What We Become

I watched her sleep, the morning light filtering through blinds we'd never quite aligned, and realized with a sudden, cold clarity that we had become zombies.

Not the Hollywood variety with decaying flesh and hunger for brains. Something worse: couples who shuffle through mortgage payments and dinner conversations, who inhabit the same bed but have forgotten how to truly see each other. We moved through our marriage like the walking dead — present, somewhere, but not entirely alive.

Three years of fertility treatments will do that. Each negative test another small death, each round of IVF another procedure that turned sex into science and hope into a spreadsheet. The water in the bathtub rippled as she shifted, and I remembered the doctor's words about fluid levels, cervical mucus, the endless hydrology of reproduction.

"You're staring," she murmured, eyes still closed.

"I'm thinking about Egypt."

That made her open her eyes. "What?"

"The sphinx." I'd been reading about it last night, unable to sleep. "How it sat for millennia while empires rose and fell, while people lived and loved and died. And it just watched, asking its riddle, eroding slowly into sand."

She sat up, water sloshing against the porcelain. "Okay. First of all, it's seven in the morning. Second, are we having an existential crisis about Egyptian monuments now?"

"I'm wondering what our riddle would be."

She was quiet for a moment. Then her hand went to her teeth. "I have spinach stuck in my molars, don't I?"

I laughed. It surprised both of us. "Yes. Left side."

"Gross." She leaned toward the mirror I'd brought in, and I saw her then — really saw her. The woman who'd held my hand at my mother's funeral. Who made the worst coffee but the best apologies. Who'd promised forever before she knew how heavy forever could feel.

"We don't have to solve it today," I said.

"The riddle?" She met my eyes in the mirror's reflection.

"Or whether to stay."

She turned around in the tub, water streaming down her arms. "Make me coffee. And then let's talk about sphinxes and zombies and whatever the hell we're becoming."

The coffee was terrible. She still burnt it. But as she sat across from me, spinach gone from her teeth, eyes searching mine, I thought maybe zombies could remember being human. Maybe the riddle wasn't in the solving.

Maybe it was in the sitting down together to ask.