The Art of Losing

The goldfish had survived three months, which was three months longer than her marriage. Lena watched it circle the bowl on her kitchen counter, its orange scales catching the morning light, and wondered about creatures that could live entire lives in twenty gallons of water. She'd bought it on impulse from a pet store two days after David moved out, as if something small and alive might fill the sudden quiet of her apartment.

Now, standing at the kitchen sink, she was making spinach salad for a dinner party she didn't want to host. Her sister was bringing her new boyfriend—a baseball analyst who worked for some sports network—and Lena had spent the morning scrubbing grout and wondering when her life had become this: thirty-five years old, divorced, with a pet fish that stared at her with what she imagined was judgment.

"You're not helping," she told the goldfish. It swam to the surface, mouth opening and closing.

Outside, her neighbor's dog began to bark. A golden retriever named Buster who had developed a habit of escaping his yard and greeting Lena with muddy paws whenever she returned from work. Last week, she'd let him inside and sat on the floor with him, stroking his feathers-soft fur while he licked her face with enthusiastic disregard for personal boundaries. She'd cried into his neck, the kind of ugly sobbing she couldn't seem to do alone anymore, and he'd simply pressed closer, warm and solid and needing nothing from her except to be there.

She'd thought about getting a dog. Something that would force her to leave the apartment, to walk outside, to be in the world. But then she'd remember how she'd forgotten to eat, to shower, to call her mother back in those first weeks after David left. How could she be responsible for another living thing when she could barely take care of herself?

The baseball analyst talked about statistics and probability all through dinner, like relationships were equations you could solve if you had enough data. Lena drank too much wine and nodded, watching her sister laugh at something he said about curveballs and momentum. Later, she would wash dishes alone in her kitchen while the goldfish swam its endless circles, and she would think about how some things—loss, disappointment, the particular ache of missed chances—accumulated like injuries in a long season. You could ice them, rest them, but they changed how you moved regardless.

At midnight, she heard Buster barking outside her door. When she opened it, he bounded in, pressing his warm weight against her legs. She sat on the floor with him, wrapping her arms around his neck, breathing in his grass-and-earth smell. The goldfish watched them both, swimming through its small illuminated world, and somewhere in the distance, someone was playing catch—the rhythmic thud of a baseball meeting leather, the sound of something thrown and caught, thrown and caught, an infinite loop of arrival and return.