Bear Market of the Heart

The goldfish bowl sat on her desk like a neglected oracle, its solitary inhabitant circling the same neon-gravel path, decade after decade. Sarah watched it while reviewing the quarterly projections—another brutal quarter in what the analysts were calling a persistent bear market.

"You're not eating," David said, appearing behind her with a container of takeout. "Again."

She gestured at the spreadsheets. "Who has appetite when we're about to announce layoffs?"

"Exactly why you need sustenance." He set down the food and pulled a bottle from his pocket. "And these. The good vitamin D stuff. You're pale as a ghost."

Sarah stared at the supplements. Everything was a solution now. Pills for sadness, creams for aging, algorithmic fixes for dying businesses. Her father had died last winter, and she'd barely felt anything at all—just a hollow efficiency, like her emotions had been outsourced to some automated system optimized for productivity.

"I'm fine, David."

"You're not." He leaned against her desk. "You haven't been fine since the funeral. You haven't been fine since we slept together and you pretended it didn't happen."

The goldfish surfaced, mouth opening and closing in silent judgment.

"That was—"

"A mistake? Bullshit." His voice cracked. "It wasn't bullshit to me."

She looked away. The bull market had ended years ago, but the bull in the room—the one they'd been avoiding for months—still stood there, massive and impossible to ignore.

"I can't right now," she whispered. "Everything is collapsing."

"Everything except this." He took her hand. "Whatever else falls apart, Sarah.

The goldfish continued its endless circuit, oblivious to the elephants in the room, but Sarah finally saw what she'd been refusing to bear: that some things, unlike markets, didn't have to recover to be worth holding onto.