The Division of Things

The goldfish bowl sat between us like a contested border, the orange fish swimming in oblivious circles while we divided seven years of accumulated life. Sarah wanted the Vitamix. I wanted the vintage bear figurine my mother gave me before she died.

"You never even liked that thing," she said, gesturing at the bear with the hand that now wore no ring. Her skin looked pale in the harsh overhead light of our—my—apartment.

"It's not about liking. It's about—"

"It's about principle," she finished for me, and I hated how well she still knew me. "Everything's about principle with you, Marcus. Even the vitamin supplements you insist we both take. Even the cable package we don't watch."

She was right, of course. That was the problem. Sarah had always been right, which made the way things ended somehow worse. If she'd been wrong about something, anything significant, maybe I could have built a case. But she wasn't wrong about the stagnation, the silence that had grown like kudzu through our conversations, the way we'd become roommates who shared a bed and nothing else.

The goldfish surfaced, gulping at the surface. Neither of us wanted it.

"I could give it to James," she said. "He's been a good friend through all this."

James. The friend who'd been there to listen when she needed to talk. The friend who'd looked at her with too much understanding across too many dinner parties. I wondered if they'd already discussed the goldfish.

"Take it," I said. "Take the blender too."

She paused, something flickering behind her eyes. Was it relief? Disappointment that I wasn't fighting harder? "You're not even going to ask about James?"

"What would be the point?" I picked up the bear, its glass eyes catching the light. "Principle, remember?"

The cable box flickered to life behind us—some show we'd meant to watch together, never did. The laugh track echoed through the half-empty room. I watched Sarah's silhouette against the screen and realized I was already mourning her, not as she'd been these past two years, but as she'd been before everything went wrong. The version of her who'd once said this apartment felt like home.

She left with the goldfish in a Tupperware container, the blender tucked under her arm. I sat with the bear and the silence, wondering at what point a relationship becomes like those vitamin supplements she'd hated—something you take because you're supposed to, not because it does anything anymore.