The Architecture of Forgetting

The goldfish stared at her through the glass, its orange scales catching the fluorescent light of the twenty-seventh floor. Sarah watched its mouth open and close, that perpetual fish expression of surprise, and thought about how they supposedly had three-second memories. A convenient myth, really—the kind you tell yourself to justify walking away from something that hurt.

She looked at her iphone, the screen glowing with a message she'd already read twelve times. *We need to talk.* The pyramid of Marcus's corporation loomed outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, that brutal glass triangle that dominated the Chicago skyline. Inside, he was probably forgetting her right now, climbing toward something he'd always wanted more than he'd wanted her.

The goldfish swam to the other side of its bowl, innocent of betrayal, innocent of the way ambition hollowed people out from the inside. Sarah had brought it to this office three years ago, back when she still believed in the permanence of things. Back when she'd thought Marcus was different from the other executives in the pyramid—before she understood that hunger for power was a kind of gravity that eventually pulled everyone downward.

She pressed her thumb to her phone, feeling the phantom vibration of another message that wasn't there. The goldfish turned in the water, completing another circle in its tiny universe.

"You're lucky," she whispered to the fish. "Nobody expects you to remember anything."

The pyramid across the street caught the last light of sunset, its glass surface winking like it knew something she didn't. Marcus would be at the top now, looking out at the city he owned, maybe already forgetting the way she looked in the mornings, the way she'd believed in him when nobody else had.

Or maybe he wouldn't forget. Maybe he'd remember everything, and that would be worse.

She packed the goldfish bowl into its cardboard box, sealed it with tape, and picked up her phone. No message. The empty screen reflected her own face back at her—someone who was learning, finally, that some pyramids were meant to be climbed alone.