The Aquarium of Goodbye

The vitamin bottle sat on the counter where she'd left it three months ago. Vitamin D, she'd said, pressing the amber gel into my palm. You don't get enough sun working those late shifts. I swallowed it dry, standing in our kitchen that still smelled like her vanilla candle and the cat's canned food.

"You should get a dog," Marcus said, pouring whiskey into two chipped mugs. We sat on his back porch watching the rain streak the darkness. "Dogs force you to go outside. They don't let you rot."

"I had a dog once," I said. "You remember."

"Yeah. What was his name?"

"Barnaby. He died when we were twelve."

Marcus was the oldest friend I had left. The others had scattered—marriage, careers, the slow drift of lives diverging. But Marcus stayed, though we'd become different people. He was unhappily married; I was unhappily not. We met in this halfway space of drinks and memories.

Inside his house, a goldfish swam in endless circles in a bowl on the mantelpiece. It had been there for years, a survivor of forgotten water changes and overfeeding. I found myself staring at it whenever the conversation lulled, hypnotized by its stupid persistence.

"You still seeing her?" Marcus asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

"She left. Moved to Seattle."

"Shit. I'm sorry, man."

I nodded. The cat I'd inherited from her—the only thing she'd left behind—had stopped eating two days ago. The vet said it was kidney failure, old age, the slow erosion of time that takes everything eventually. I'd made the appointment for tomorrow.

"You know what I think about sometimes?" I said. "That goldfish. Does it know it's swimming in circles? Does it have any concept of a world beyond the glass?"

Marcus laughed, a short sharp sound. "Maybe it's happy. Maybe that's the secret—just keep swimming until you don't."

We drank until the bottle was empty. When I got home, the cat was curled in the center of the bed, her breathing shallow. I lay down beside her, listening. Outside, dawn was breaking—pale and tentative, the first real sunlight we'd seen in weeks. I'd forgotten to take my vitamin. I'd forgotten to feed the fish I didn't have. I'd forgotten most things except that she was gone and this small warm animal was going too, and somewhere in Seattle, someone else was learning to love in the spaces I'd left behind.