The Last Message

The iPhone sat on her nightstand, its screen lighting up every few minutes with notifications she couldn't bring herself to check. Three weeks since the funeral, and still her thumb hovered over his name in her contacts, the muscle memory of late-night calls harder to break than she'd anticipated.

She traced the lifeline on her left palm—the one that palm reader in New Orleans had said would be 'long and full of love'—and wondered if the woman had simply been very good at reading desperate tourists. The line did look long. She'd always thought that meant longevity, not that it would hold enough love to break her when it ended.

His apartment still smelled like him, or maybe she was just imagining it. The goldfish they'd won at that summer street fair—a ridiculous carnival prize they'd drunkenly christened 'Bubbles' despite its defiant orange coloring—swam in lazy circles in its bowl on the kitchen counter. She'd been feeding it. She'd been keeping it alive. She wasn't sure why, except that something about its mute, uncomplaining presence felt like the only thing still tethering her to the version of herself that had believed in forever.

The iPhone lit up again. A text from his sister: 'Going through his things. Found something of yours.' She stared at the message until the screen went dark, her palm pressed flat against her chest, feeling the steady rhythm of a heart that kept beating despite everything.

Bubbles rose to the surface of its bowl, mouth opening and closing in silent repetition. She watched it, thinking about how goldfish supposedly had no memory, how each circuit around their tiny world was perpetually new. What would that be like? To never carry anything forward?

Her phone buzzed one more time. This time she answered.

'Send me a picture,' she typed.

And when it came through—her missing earring, the one she'd thought lost somewhere between his sheets and his heart—she didn't cry. She simply held the phone in her palm, screen burning bright against her skin, and remembered that some things find their way back to you, and some things you have to learn to let swim away.