Goldfish Don't Remember

The hat was hers—a wide-brimmed straw thing she'd worn to that terrible beach wedding where we'd both gotten sunburned and too drunk on cheap champagne. Three months after the funeral, I was still wearing it around the apartment, as if her scent might linger in the woven fibers. It didn't. Nothing did.

I was running again—not the therapeutic kind, but the fleeing kind. Through the city at 2 AM, past the bodegas and the neon-lit laundromats, my sneakers slapping against pavement slick with recent rain. The water had stopped falling hours ago, but the city still wept.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Mark, wanting to know if I was coming into the office tomorrow. Mark, who kept saying "it's been three months, Maya, you need to move on." Mark, who'd sent me a LinkedIn article about the five stages of grief with the subject line "thought this might help :)"

I kept running.

I'd become a zombie this year—alive, technically, but moving through motions I couldn't feel. The alarm clock, the shower, the coffee that never tasted right anymore. The commute. The emails. The meetings where I nodded and took notes and understood nothing. The grocery store aisles where I stood paralyzed by too many cereal options. Sleep, when it came, was the only relief, and even then, I dreamt of things I couldn't remember upon waking.

They say goldfish have three-second memories. Sometimes I wished I could be so lucky. To swim in circles and find everything new each time, instead of haunted by what I'd lost.

But then I'd come home to the apartment we'd painted together—that terrible yellow we'd both hated but agreed on because we were too tired to argue—and there he'd be: Mr. Bubbles, the goldfish we'd won at that carnival last summer. The one she'd insisted we keep even though we had no bowl, no food, no idea how to care for a fish.

"You're just a fish," I'd tell him, watching him swim in his small glass world. "You don't know she's gone."

He'd press his mouth against the glass, opening and closing it in that perpetually surprised O, and I'd wonder if maybe he did know. Maybe he was waiting for her too.

Tonight, I stopped running and stood on the bridge that spanned the highway below. The water rushing beneath—that was what she'd loved about this city. The way it moved, always changing, always the same.

I took off the hat and held it over the railing. The wind caught it, and for a second I thought about letting go. But then I thought of Mr. Bubbles, swimming his endless circles, waiting for someone who wasn't coming home. And I pulled the hat back onto my head, turned around, and started the long walk home.

Someone had to feed the fish.