The Goldfish's Exit Strategy

The goldfish, Leonard, had better retirement benefits than Maya did. At three years old, he'd outlasted two rounds of layoffs and one particularly brutal restructuring. Maya watched him drift through his castle-shaped plastic ruin, his orange scales catching the fluorescent light of her office on the 42nd floor.

A pyramid of unread reports teetered on her desk, each one a potential career advancement or career-ending mistake. Her department head had spent yesterday's meeting sketching the new organizational structure—a literal pyramid with himself at the apex, his direct reports beneath him, and everyone else crushed at the foundation.

Maya had been running for six months now. Every morning at 5:30, she laced up her shoes and fled her apartment, her condo, her life. She ran until her lungs burned and her legs trembled, until the corporate ladder dissolved into pavement and breath and the undeniable fact of her own body in motion.

The thing about goldfish, she'd read, was that they'd keep growing if given enough space. In small bowls, they stayed small, their growth constrained by their environment. Leonard's bowl sat on her desk, a perfect circle of confinement.

She stood up. The pyramid of reports slid toward the edge, threatening collapse.

"Maya?" David's voice. Her direct supervisor, the man who'd placed his own name one tier above hers in yesterday's diagram. "You coming to the strategy session?"

"No," she said.

"What?"

"No." She picked up Leonard's bowl. "I'm not."

David laughed, nervous. "That's not how it works."

"I know." She thought about running, about the way the world blurred when you moved fast enough, about how she'd been swimming in circles for so long she'd forgotten there was an ocean. "But I'm done being the fish who builds her own castle."

She walked out. Leonard swam beside her, carrying his water and his castle toward the elevator.

She didn't know where she was going. But for the first time in three years, she was moving toward something instead of just circling something else.