The Aquarium

Maya felt like a zombie most days now. The feeling started somewhere around her third year at the firm—a gradual hollowing out until she was just moving through motions, smile glued on, responding to emails that didn't matter, solving problems that would regenerate by morning like Hydra heads.

Her cat, Luna, was the only thing that felt real anymore. Every evening, Maya would collapse onto her couch and Luna would pad over, jump up with deliberate grace, and press her warm weight against Maya's chest. Those twelve pounds of purring creature held more life than everything Maya did between 9 AM and 7 PM combined.

She was supposed to be at a wellness retreat in Palm Springs this weekend—corporate-mandated burnout prevention, the irony of which wasn't lost on anyone. Instead she'd called in sick, claiming stomach flu. She'd spent Saturday morning standing in her tiny backyard, palm tree fronds rustling overhead in the desert wind, drinking lukewarm coffee and watching her neighbor's sprinklers create rainbows against the fence.

The office lobby had been redesigned last month. Now it featured a massive wall of aquariums, hundreds of goldfish swimming in endless circles. They'd put Maya's desk right across from them. Some days she watched the fish for hours, their orange and white bodies flashing in the blue light, opening and closing their stupid mouths, swimming into glass, turning around, swimming again.

"It's calming," her boss had said. "Biophilic design."

Maya had nodded. Hadn't had the heart to say it looked like imprisonment.

Sunday night, Luna asleep on her feet, Maya stared at her laptop. The quarterly report was due Tuesday. She thought about the fish, how they'd probably been bred for this—born to swim in circles for corporate lobbies across America. She thought about the water bill she couldn't pay this month. She thought about the palm tree in her yard, how it had grown two feet in the year she'd lived here, how it would probably outlast her tenure at the firm, how it would still be there long after she'd figured out whatever came next.

Luna shifted in her sleep, paws twitching after dream mice. Maya closed her laptop. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow she'd draft her resignation letter. But for now, she watched her cat breathe, and tried to remember what it felt like to know what she wanted next.