What the Sphinx Knows

The sphinx of cracked asphalt sat outside our bedroom window, its concrete face weathered by three decades of Chicago winters. Marcus installed it the year we bought the house, back when we still made jokes about guarding our domestic kingdom. Now it just stared blankly at the driveway where his company car used to be.

I swallowed my vitamin D supplement with lukewarm coffee, the pill catching in my throat like all the words I never said. The fertility specialist had recommended them, along with lowered expectations and more sex. Marcus had laughed at that part, that tight, weary laugh that meant he was already somewhere else.

'You're like a fox,' he'd told me during our last real conversation, three months ago. 'Always waiting, watching, ready to run.' He wasn't wrong. I'd been running since I found the receipt for the downtown hotel room, since I noticed he stopped wearing his wedding ring to conferences.

The goldfish circled its bowl in the living room, a wedding gift from his mother. Five years of silent swimming in chlorinated water, and I envied its ten-second memory. What I wouldn't give to forget the sound of his key in the lock, the way he'd stopped looking at me like I was something worth discovering.

'You want me to bear this alone,' I'd said to his voicemail last night, after the third unanswered call. 'That's not what marriage means.' But maybe it was. Maybe marriage was just bearing things together until you couldn't anymore.

I watched the sphinx through the window, its riddle finally clear: what has a mortgage, shared history, and nowhere left to go? The answer sat across from me at breakfast tomorrow morning, if Marcus came home at all. If he didn't, I'd finally have to learn how to be the one who walks away.