The Inventory of Leaving

She stood in his study, surrounded by the debris of thirty years. The *vitamin* supplements on his desk—D3, B12, magnesium—taunted her with their promise of longevity he'd never receive. He'd taken them faithfully every morning with water from the *baseball* mug she'd given him on their fifth anniversary, the one with the crack running through the team logo like a fault line.

Her elderly *cat*, Matilda, wound around her ankles, purring. This room had been off-limits to the cat for years. Now the rules dissolved along with everything else.

On the bookshelf sat the faded *hat* he'd worn the day they met. That rainy afternoon at the market when she'd forgotten her umbrella and he'd offered his, then walked her three blocks in nothing but a t-shirt, getting drenched. She'd laughed at his hair plastered to his forehead, wild and dark then, not thinning and white like the photographs from his final months.

The bedside table held the small glass bowl with the *goldfish*, a carnival prize from their daughter's first birthday. Sarah was twenty-four now, married, living in Chicago, unable to fly back for the funeral. Somehow the fish had survived through six apartments, two houses, one miscarriage, his cancer diagnosis, the chemotherapy that made him smell like metal and despair. The fish just kept swimming, its orange scales flashing in the afternoon light, indifferent to human tragedy.

She'd read once that goldfish have three-second memories. Maybe that was the trick. Maybe she could learn to live in three-second increments, swimming from one moment to the next without carrying the weight of all the moments before.

"Well," she said aloud to the empty room, "time to begin."

She opened the trash bag. The vitamins went first. Then the hat. The baseball mug. The goldfish bowl she carried to the kitchen sink. As she watched the tiny creature spiral down the drain, she realized she wasn't freeing herself from memory. She was drowning in it.

She should have kept the fish. At least one of them should survive.