The Aquarium of Empty Rooms

Mara stood in her mother's kitchen, the cat winding between her ankles like a living question mark. Six weeks after the funeral, and still she was sorting through a life distilled into boxes and bags.

"You should take him," her sister had said about the cat, as if love were something you could transfer like property.

The goldfish bowl sat on the counter, its solitary inhabitant circling in endless, pointless loops. Her mother had won it at a carnival decades ago, some impulsive middle-aged rebellion against the careful rationing of joy. How many times had Mara watched this fish survive on forgotten feedings, on indifference, on the bare minimum? It was like some kind of bio-monument to her parents' marriage — things that stayed alive not because they were nurtured, but because they refused to die.

Her phone buzzed. David, asking if she wanted to get dinner. David, with his new apartment and his deliberate-forward-movement therapy speak. David, who'd moved out three months ago with boxes packed as neatly as his feelings.

She opened the cabinet where her mother had kept her medications. Rows of amber bottles, a pharmacopoeia of hope and denial. Vitamin D for bones that had already begun to hollow. Vitamin C for a heart that had quietly failed in the night. B-complex for the nervous system that had misfired one final time.

Mara shook a vitamin into her palm. A supplement for the body, but what was the equivalent for the soul? What pill could you take for the particular ache of standing in your childhood kitchen at age thirty-four, realizing you'd become the kind of person who measured life in what remained rather than what was possible?

The cat meowed, demanding something she didn't know how to give. The goldfish rose to the surface, mouth opening and closing in silent testimony to adaptation.

"Yeah," she texted David. "Dinner sounds good."

She packed the cat carrier. She drained the goldfish bowl into a Mason jar. She pocketed the vitamins. Some things you carried forward. Some things you left behind. And somewhere in the inadequacy of both choices was the only way to keep moving.