The Memory We Keep

The goldfish bowl sat on the windowsill of our apartment, three years after you left. I still changed the water every Tuesday, though I couldn't say why. The fish—your fish, originally—circled in its orange prison, mouth opening and closing in that perpetual silent scream. You'd named him Senator, after your father, and the joke had worn thin somewhere around our second anniversary.

I was thirty-four and running on coffee and spite most days. The law firm where we'd met as associates had made me partner last month, and I kept waiting for it to feel like something other than a hollow victory. You would have been happy for me, I think. Or maybe you would have said it was exactly what I deserved—ambition consuming whatever soft parts of me you'd once claimed to love.

The baseball game played on a television I wasn't watching, the sound down low. Spring training, always spring training. You used to drag me to games, drunk on cheap beer and possibility, explaining the statistics like they were sacred texts. I never understood your devotion to a sport where failing seven times out of ten still made you a hero. But I loved watching you love it, that rare unguarded joy spreading across your face like something I'd earned just by witnessing.

The phone rang. Your number.

"I'm getting married," you said, and the orange evening light caught the dust motes swimming through the air around Senator's bowl, and I thought: this is what it means to be alive, isn't it? To keep swimming, to keep coming up for air, even when you're not sure anyone is watching.

"Congratulations," I said, and meant it, mostly. "To who?"

Your laugh came through the line, unchanged. "You'll hate him. He's a financial analyst. Plays softball on weekends."

"Sounds perfect."

"I still think about you," you said, and then, quickly, "I shouldn't have said that."

After we hung up, I dropped a flake of food into Senator's water. The fish darted up, eager, predictable, alive. Outside, the sky burned the same impossible orange it had the night you told me some loves aren't meant to last, just to matter. And I thought: perhaps that's enough. Perhaps that was always enough.