Goldfish Wakefulness

I floated through AP Chem feeling like a certified zombie, my brain three seconds from total system failure. Finals week will do that to you—or at least, that's what I told myself. The real culprit was the 3 AM gaming binge that had turned my eyelids into sandpaper weights.

"Take your vitamins, mijo," my mom had said that morning, pressing those neon orange gummies into my palm like they were contraband. "Your brain needs fuel." I'd pocketed them, trading them to Jake for a significantly more useful bag of sour patch kids during third period. Because that's who I was: the guy who made bad deals for temporary fixes.

The goldfish sat on my desk, a carnival prize from freshman year that refused to die despite my complete neglect. Its name was Dusty, and it had this way of staring at me through the bowl like it knew things. Deep things. Things about how I was failing pre-calc, how I hadn't told my parents I'd quit track, how sometimes I didn't recognize the person in the mirror.

"You're just a fish," I whispered, dropping a pinch of food into the water. "What do you know about feeling like you're underwater all the time?"

Dusty swam to the top, gulping. That's when it hit me—maybe the zombie thing wasn't about being half-dead. Maybe it was about being half-awake, sleepwalking through my own life while everyone expected me to be fully alive and functioning. The vitamins, the grades, the extracurriculars—they were all just attempts to jumpstart a system I'd never actually turned on.

I grabbed my phone and drafted a text to my mom: *Can we talk later? I think I need help figuring some stuff out.* Then I cracked open my pre-calc textbook. Not because I suddenly loved math, but because for the first time in months, I actually wanted to show up.

Dusty did a little spin, and I swear that fish was smiling at me.