Freedom in a Bowl

The goldfish Maria left behind has outlived her by three months. This strikes me as both poetic and cruel - that a creature with a supposed five-second memory should be the sole keeper of everything I can't bring myself to say aloud.

We were friends, yes, but we were also something else - something that lived in the charged silences between our words, in the way her hand lingered on my arm when she laughed, in how we both pretended not to notice. She called it "complicated." I called it terrifying.

We met at padel - she was terrible, swinging her racquet like she was fighting off invisible bees. I should've beaten her effortlessly. Instead I found myself missing returns on purpose, just to extend the match, extend the afternoon, extend us.

Afterwards, she'd always produce an orange from her bag, peeling it with sticky fingers. "Vitamin C," she'd say. "For my immune system. And for yours, because you're old and I don't want you dying on me." She was twenty-nine. I was thirty-two. We both knew age had nothing to do with it.

The last time I saw her, she stood in my doorway with a cardboard box. Inside: the fishbowl, Freedom swimming his frantic circles.

"If something happens," she said, not meeting my eyes, "he's yours."

"You're being weird, Maria."

"Just take the fish, okay? He needs feeding once a day. Don't overdo it."

She kissed my cheek - briefly, perfunctorily, like she was already somewhere else. She never came back.

Now I live with her ghost in the form of a fish. Freedom watches me from his glass prison while I move through rooms that still smell faintly of her perfume - vanilla and something sharp, maybe grapefruit, maybe the oranges she was always eating.

The evening light turns the water orange-gold. Freedom bumps the glass and I jump, even though he does this every day.

Sometimes I talk to him. It's pathetic, I know. But he was the last thing she touched. The last thing she chose to leave behind.

I don't tell him about the pills. About the note, short and terrible in its absence of explanations. About how I should've asked what she meant that day - if I should've reached for her hand instead of taking the box.

Instead I drop in the flakes and watch him eat, swimming in his patient circles. Some secrets should stay buried. Some circles should never be broken. Not yet.