The Science of Leaving

The vitamin was supposed to fix everything. That's what David had said when he handed her the orange prescription bottle, his wedding ring catching on the fluorescent light of her laboratory. "For the anxiety," he'd said, though they both knew it was for the inconvenient guilt that threatened to crystallize between them whenever his wife called his cell phone.

Elena palmed the pill now, standing before the fish tank in her apartment at 2 AM. The goldfish—David's parting gift, some joke about low-maintenance companionship—swam in restless circles, its metallic scales reflecting the streetlights that filtered through the rain-streaked window. She named him Arthur, after her father who'd left when she was seven. Some patterns repeated like stubborn algorithms.

Outside, lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the empty half of her bed. The storm had been building for days, the kind of atmospheric pressure that made your teeth ache. Her cat, a scarred tomcat she'd found behind the research facility, paced the windowsill, his yellow eyes fixed on something beyond the glass.

"You know he's not coming back," she whispered to the fish, to the cat, to herself. The words dissolved into the humid air, inconsequential as dust.

The goldfish rose to the surface, its mouth breaking the water in silent repetition. Feed me. Notice me. Choose me.

Elena pressed her palm against the cool glass. She'd spent three years developing a compound that could selectively suppress emotional memory—could make people forget grief, betrayal, heartbreak without touching the useful memories. David's pharmaceutical company had funded it. David had supervised it. David had used it as pretext for coffee, then drinks, then the hotel room with the view of the city where neither of them lived.

The lightning struck closer now, thunder rattling the windowpanes. The cat turned from the storm to stare at her, unimpressed by her existential crisis.

She flushed the vitamin down the toilet instead.

"Food's in the bowl," she told the cat, watching him trot toward the kitchen with calculated indifference.

The goldfish continued his circuits, ignorant of abandonment, faithful to the parameters of his existence. Elena smiled, finally understanding something about survival that her research had never quantified. Some things didn't need to be fixed. Some things just needed to be witnessed.

She picked up her phone, scrolled past David's number, and called her mother instead.