Goldfish Don't Remember

The first time David called her his little goldfish, she'd laughed. They were lying in bed after, her head on his chest, his fingers stroking her hair. 'You know what goldfish do?' he'd whispered. 'They keep swimming until they forget where they started. Just like us - going in circles, but happy about it.'

She hadn't understood it was a warning.

Three years later, she was swimming laps at the community center, trying to outpace the memory of finding his texts. The pool lights cast an orange glow across the water at sunset - the same orange as the sunset on their honeymoon in Greece, where they'd gotten drunk on cheap wine and talked about forever. She'd believed him then. She'd believed that two people could keep swimming without ever hitting the wall.

'You're going to tire yourself out,' a voice said. She surfaced to find a bear of a man in the next lane, his gray chest hair plastered flat, watching her with concerned eyes. 'Been watching you for twenty minutes. You're swimming angry.'

The word caught in her throat. 'Just needed to think.'

He nodded, understanding something without her saying it. 'My wife left me last year. I swam like that for months. Then one day I realized - you can't outswim what follows you home.'

She saw David later that evening, standing outside their apartment building with HER - the fox-faced junior partner from his firm, all sharp angles and knowing smiles. Their hands touched, just briefly, but it was the kind of touch that said everything Marie had refused to see for months: the late nights, the sudden business trips, the way he'd started pulling away from her touch like she was something he'd outgrown.

The goldfish bowl still sat on their kitchen counter, empty now. She'd stopped replacing them after the third one died - or maybe she'd just stopped caring whether something lived or died in that glass prison.

'David,' she said when he finally came upstairs, the woman gone. 'I'm not swimming in circles anymore.'

He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time in months. 'Marie -'

She shook her head. 'The goldfish thing? That wasn't sweet. It was you telling me exactly who we were. And I'm done being something that forgets where it started.'

She left that night with a single suitcase, walking out into the orange streetlights, not knowing where she was going but certain for the first time that she was moving forward.