What the Sphinx Remembers

The goldfish died three days before our anniversary, floating belly-up in its glass kingdom while I chopped spinach for a salad that would never be eaten. You watched from the doorway, your face blank as paper, and I thought: this is what a decade looks like. This is what happens when you stop asking questions.

"It's just a fish," you said, but the words hung heavy between us like the water that had sustained it, clear and unmoving.

I drove to the ocean that night. Some instinct pulled me — the same ancient gravity that draws foxes to the edge of the woods, that pulled seekers to the Sphinx with their riddles. What answer was I looking for? The tide was out when I arrived, the wet sand reflecting a moon that looked startlingly like the one we'd watched from our balcony in Barcelona, before everything became unsaid.

The Sphinx knew: sometimes silence is the loudest thing. You become someone who doesn't speak, and then you become someone who can't. The riddle isn't what you've lost — it's that you've forgotten you were ever asked to begin with.

I found a fox at the water's edge, drinking from a tidepool. It didn't run. Just looked at me with eyes that held something like recognition, like it saw all the versions of myself I'd stopped being: the woman who painted, who sang off-key, who asked why your eyes stayed so fixed on the middle distance.

When I returned, you were asleep on the couch. The spinach sat slimy and forgotten on the counter. In the bathroom, the empty fishbowl caught the morning light — a crystal mouth that had swallowed its own tongue. I watched your chest rise and fall, that familiar rhythm, and realized: goldfish are said to have seven-second memories. But we're no different. We forget what we were promised. We forget how to want what we already have. We forget, most of all, that we're forgetting at all.

The Sphinx asks: what walks on four legs, then two, then three? Maybe the real riddle is: what walks away, then stays, then doesn't know the difference anymore?