Glass Walls

The cat appeared at my door three days after Sarah left, a scrawny tabby with one ear shredded from something—fight, maybe, or the casual cruelty of whatever world it had escaped. I named him Arthur, which was stupid because naming things meant keeping them, and I was terrible at keeping things.

I watched him now from the kitchen window, crouched in the overgrown grass, watching the goldfish pond with predatory stillness. The fish drifted through murky water, orange flashes like trapped sunlight. Sarah had built that pond the summer we thought we'd stay in this house forever. The summer before everything got complicated. Before the job offer in London. Before the conversations about sacrifice and resentment and who owed whom what.

"You're not serious about going," she'd said, not asking, and I'd said, "I have to be serious about something," which was the truest thing I'd ever admitted. The fish had been there, swimming in oblivious circles beneath us.

Arthur pounced. A splash, a thrash, nothing caught. He shook water from his paws with offended dignity.

I'd found Arthur in the alley behind my office, meowing at the dumpster like it had personally wronged him. Something about his persistence reminded me of—well, of everything. Of starting over. Of trying to find solid ground in a world that kept shifting. I'd brought him home because the apartment was too quiet and I was tired of my own company.

"You'll leave too," I told him through the glass. "They all do."

He looked back at me, unimpressed.

The goldfish were Sarah's goodbye present to herself. She couldn't take them, couldn't leave them to die, so she made me promise I'd care for them. Five years later, they were still here, swimming through their enclosed lives, while I'd added a cat to the collection of things I couldn't quite let go of.

I opened the door. Arthur trotted in, tail high, like he owned the place. Maybe he did. Maybe we were all just swimming in circles, waiting for something to change, or for the courage to make it change ourselves.