What the Sphinx Remembers

The assisted living facility smelled of lemon disinfectant and forgotten things. I found Martha in the dayroom, staring at a tank in the corner. Three goldfish—orange, white, speckled—circled in endless motion, their three-second memories a cruel joke on the residents surrounding them.

"You came," she said. Not a question. Martha had always been sphinx-like, inscrutable as stone, even when we were young and she'd let me cry on her shoulder after my divorce. Now, at eighty-two, her face had settled into permanent mystery. The doctors called it dementia. I called it marble.

I'd brought her favorite chocolates. She didn't touch them.

"The goldfish," she whispered. "They know something we don't."

"What's that, Martha?"

She smiled, small and secret. "That forgetting is its own kind of freedom."

A television blared in the corner, some game show where contestants guessed prices. The cable connecting it to the wall snaked across the floor like a lifeline, like a tether. I almost tripped on it, the way I'd tripped through our friendship for forty years—never quite finding solid ground, never walking away.

"Do you remember," she asked, "what I told you when you left him?"

I did. She'd said: "Better to be alone than lonely with someone." I'd clung to those words like a raft in dark water.

"You told me to be brave," I said.

Martha's eyes cleared, sudden and sharp as glass. "I told you that some things break so other things can live. Like seeds. Like hearts."

The goldfish continued their circles. Martha continued watching them. And I continued loving her, this friend who had become a stranger to herself but not to me, this woman who'd spent a lifetime teaching me that the only thing harder than holding on was letting go.

I stayed until visiting hours ended. Until the goldfish disappeared into tank-darkness, until the television flickered off, until the sphinx finally closed her eyes.