The Goldfish in the Pool

Elena sat by the hotel pool, her oversized hat casting a shadow over her face. She'd come to Cabo alone—Mark's idea of a joke, using their anniversary money for what he called a 'sabbatical' but what everyone else called a midlife crisis. The divorce papers would be waiting when she returned.

The palm fronds above her rattled in the breeze. Three days ago, this had seemed romantic. Now it just felt lonely. She watched a goldfish dart through the shallow end—some guest's forgotten pet, or perhaps the hotel's attempt at whimsy. It kept swimming to the edge, as if expecting food, then darting back when it remembered the pool's chlorine wasn't its home.

'They don't last long in here,' a voice said.

Elena tilted her hat back. A man in his forties, handsome in that way married men usually were—confident, rested, utterly oblivious to what desperation looked like on a woman.

'The goldfish,' he clarified. 'My daughter threw hers in last year. We were here for her quinceañera. She said it needed to be free.' He shrugged. 'It lasted two days.'

'That's morbid,' Elena said.

'That's marriage.' He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. 'Twenty years, and suddenly you're strangers who share a mortgage. I'm David, by the way.'

They ended up at the bar, drinking something pink with too much rum. David's wife had left him for a yoga instructor. Elena's Mark had left her for—a pause, a shrug—for the idea of himself he'd lost somewhere in his thirties.

'The worst part,' Elena said, staring at her reflection in the glass patio door, 'is that I still love who he was. When we met. When he tried to save a stray cat in college and got scratched all to hell. When he cried at our wedding because he was so happy.' She swallowed. 'Where did that person go?'

David covered her hand with his. His palm was warm, calloused from—what? Construction? Tennis? It didn't matter.

'They don't disappear,' he said softly. 'They just... dissolve. Slowly. Like sugar in water. And one day you're drinking something sweet, but you can't remember when the sugar stopped being solid.'

The goldfish was still in the pool when they left, swimming in its diminishing circles, refusing to accept that the water was killing it.

Elena went back to David's room. They didn't talk about spouses or divorces or goldfish. They didn't talk at all. Later, as she dressed in the dark, she thought about how Mark had once bought her a goldfish for their first apartment. It had died in a week.

She left her hat behind. Let David keep it. Let him wonder. Some things were better left unexplained, like how a person could dissolve so completely, or why it took seeing a goldfish fight for its life in a chlorinated pool to realize she'd stopped swimming years ago.