What the Sphinx Knows

The papaya sat on the kitchen counter, already softening at the edges. Three days since I bought it, still uneaten. Some things rot before you're ready for them.

"You're going to cut into that eventually," Marcus said, not looking up from his phone. His hair was getting long again, falling over his eyes when he leaned forward. I used to push it back for him. Now I didn't touch him at all.

"Eventually."

The cat wound around my ankles, mewing for breakfast. I'd inherited her from Jen when she moved to Seattle, the last physical evidence of a friendship that had already ghosted me. Jen and I had made each other laugh until we couldn't breathe, shared secrets in the dark, promised to be bridesmaids at each other's weddings. Then she'd met someone, and somewhere between her new relationship and my corporate promotions, we'd simply... stopped. No fight. No closure. Just the slow, quiet erosion of small intimacies.

Marcus finally looked at me. His expression was unreadable—a sphinx in our tiny kitchen, holding all the answers but asking none of the questions.

"Are you going to tell me what's wrong, or do I have to guess?"

"I ran into Jen yesterday."

"Oh."

"She didn't recognize me at first."

"People change."

"We saw each other six months ago, Marcus."

He set down his phone. The cat jumped into his lap, and I watched his hands move through her fur automatically, the way they used to move through mine. I felt hollowed out by the realization: I was becoming someone who watched intimacy instead of participating in it.

"You know," I said, "the worst part isn't that we're not friends anymore. It's that I don't even know who ended it. Did I? Did she? Or did we both just... let go?"

"Does it matter?"

"Maybe. Maybe I need to know if I'm the kind of person who abandons people, or if I'm the kind who gets abandoned."

Marcus stood up, the cat padding away with offended dignity. He crossed to the counter, picked up a knife, and sliced through the papaya's thick skin. Inside, it was perfectly ripe—sweet and orange and everything I'd been waiting for.

"You're the kind of person who buys fruit and lets it sit on the counter until it's almost too late," he said, sliding a piece into his mouth. "But eventually, you cut it open."

He held out another piece to me.

I took it. The taste was sweeter than I'd expected. Some things, it turned out, were worth waiting for. And some things—like the question of who'd ended my friendship with Jen—might never be answered. The sphinx would keep its secrets.

But the papaya was delicious anyway.