Glass Tanks

The cable guy was the last person to touch me. Three weeks ago, in the empty apartment I could no longer afford, he knelt behind the television and I watched his hands—rough, efficient, utterly indifferent. When he left, he took the signal with him. Now I sit in silence with my goldfish, whose three-second memory loop feels less like a curse and more like a gift I'd pay anything to borrow.

Paddle tennis was supposed to save me. That's what Elena said when she signed us up for padel lessons at the club. 'Couples who play together,' she'd whispered against my neck that morning, before I knew she'd already packed her things. Now I show up alone to the Tuesday night matches, playing against strangers who stare at my empty partner position with polite pity. The ball ricochets off the glass walls—thwack, thwack, thwack—and I think about how everything I love ends up contained behind something transparent.

The dog came with the house. A failed retriever named Bull who couldn't retrieve anything except his own melancholy, which he carried everywhere like a wet tennis ball. When Elena left, she took the good towels and the coffee maker but left Bull behind. 'He's your problem now,' her text said. So now we're two abandoned males sleepwalking through rooms that still smell like her perfume, and I've started talking to the dog like he understands English, like he can explain why love evaporates so much faster than water.

My therapist says I'm romanticizing the past. She suggests I cut the cable completely, go offline, 'find myself.' But I can't tell her that I already did find myself, and he's a forty-two-year-old man who plays racquet sports solo and weeps over a fish that doesn't even recognize him. Some transformations don't deserve to be witnessed.

Tonight Bull nudges my knee with his wet nose. The goldfish rises to the surface, opening and closing its mouth in what looks like laughter. I pick up my padel racket from where it leans against the wall, and somewhere in the space between the cable's dead connection and the dog's steady, uncomplicated devotion, I understand: this isn't rock bottom. It's just another Tuesday. I can live with that.