Goldfish in the Sink

The goldfish floated belly-up when I came home, orange against porcelain. I'd won it at the carnival two years ago—that night we got drunk on cheap wine and you laughed until you cried. Now it was dead, and you were leaving me.

I flushed it without ceremony. The water swirled, carrying away the last living thing that tethered us to that night. I caught my reflection in the mirror: gray roots showing through my brown hair, three months since I bothered coloring it. You used to run your fingers through it and say it felt like silk. Now you say I've let myself go.

Your cat, Jasper, wound around my legs, purring. He'd be going with you, of course. The apartment would be too quiet without his demanding yowls at dawn. You'd take the furniture too. I'd be left with this hollow space and my own inadequate grief.

"I feel like a zombie," you'd said last night, staring at the ceiling while I pretended to sleep. "Just going through the motions. Wake up, work, come home, sleep. Repeat."

I hadn't said what I was thinking: that's what marriage is, eventually. That's what happens when you choose someone and keep choosing them through layoffs and funerals and the gradual erosion of dreams. But you wanted the feeling back—the electricity, the certainty that everything meant something.

You were in the bedroom now, folding clothes into your suitcase. I watched through the doorway, a ghost in my own home. The afternoon light caught the stray strands of your hair that always escaped your bun. God, I loved that hair. I loved how it looked spread across the pillow, how it smelled like vanilla and sleep.

"I'm sorry," you said, not turning around. You'd apologized twelve times in two days. The word had lost all meaning.

"I know," I said.

You left with Jasper in his carrier and a car full of boxes. I stood in the living room as your taillights faded. Then I went to the bathroom and stared at the sink where the goldfish had been.

I turned on the faucet, let the water run until it overflowed the basin, spilling onto the floor. I didn't move. I just watched it rise, thinking about how some things float and some things sink, and how the difference between them is almost impossible to predict until it's too late.