The Goldfish forget

Marcelo's hair had started thinning at thirty-two. By forty, the crown was a sparse meadow where his grandfather's thick black mane had grazed. He ran his fingers through it every morning, counting the casualties in the sink, until Elena bought him vitamins—expensive, promising everything from regrowth to renewed vitality. He swallowed them dutifully, a small hope in capsule form.

They'd stopped speaking at dinner months ago. The silence grew until it filled every corner of their Berlin apartment, suffocating conversation before it could breathe. Elena moved through rooms like she was haunting them, present and absent all at once. Marcelo started working late, not because there was work to do, but because the office was less empty than home.

He bought a goldfish on impulse—something alive that couldn't ask why they'd stopped trying. It swam in endless circles in its bowl on the kitchen counter, a creature of pure motion without memory, freed from the weight of what came before. Marcelo envied it.

"We're zombies," Elena said one night, appearing in the kitchen doorway like she'd materialized from the thickening quiet. Her hair was pulled back severe, exposing the exhaustion etched around her eyes. "Not the ones from movies. Worse. The kind that still have heartbeats."

The goldfish swam to the glass, mouth opening and closing in silent repetition.

"Remember when we believed we were different?" she continued. "When we thought we'd never become people who just... exist?"

Marcelo looked at his vitamin bottles lined up on the counter, their promises mocking him. Regrowth. Renewal. Revival. As if you could purchase transformation off a pharmacy shelf.

"I forgot to feed him," Marcelo said suddenly. "The fish. I haven't fed him in three days."

Elena crossed to the bowl, sprinkled flakes that drifted like snow. The fish darted to the surface, devouring without gratitude, without memory of hunger's absence.

"Maybe that's the gift," she said, not looking at him. "Forgetting. Starting over every three seconds. Never carrying anything forward."

"We'd have to learn to be strangers again."

"Maybe that's exactly what we need."

She touched his hair, his thinning hair, with something like tenderness. The goldfish circled on, fed and forgetful, while outside their window, Berlin kept existing, indifferent to the small deaths and possible resurrections happening in kitchens across the city.