The Weight of Water

The hotel pool shimmered like something from a dream I kept having—where you were always there, standing waist-deep in the blue, watching me from across the water. Tonight, you were getting married to someone else in the ballroom three floors above, and I was here, fully clothed on a concrete deck, drinking overpriced chardonnay from a plastic cup.

A woman in a sequined dress stumbled past, clutching a goldfish bowl. The fish—orange and absurd—swam in desperate circles, its mouth opening and closing in what looked like panic. 'My ex gave him to me,' she said, setting the bowl on the table beside me. 'Can't exactly throw him away, can I?' She laughed, too loud. 'Bit like the marriage, honestly. Just keep swimming until you forget you're trapped.'

I thought about that summer you took me to your brother's baseball game. The crack of the bat, the smell of cheap beer and cut grass, your hand warm on my thigh. You told me you loved me in the seventh inning stretch. I believed you—the way you believe certain things must be true because they feel like they should be. But love, I've learned, has less to do with truth and more to do with the stories we tell ourselves to keep getting up in the morning.

'I should go upstairs,' I said to the woman, but neither of us moved.

'The goldfish has a three-second memory,' she said. 'Imagine that. Every lap around the bowl is a whole new life.' She looked at me, really looked. 'Sometimes I think that would be easier.'

I watched the fish make another circuit. 'Maybe we're already doing it,' I said. 'Maybe that's what grief is—swimming in circles and forgetting, over and over, that we're the ones who put ourselves in the bowl.'

Somewhere above, the band started playing. A waltz. You hated dancing. You'd complained about it for weeks when we planned ours—the one that never happened. I reached into my purse, found the crumpled RSVP. yes, it said, in handwriting I barely recognized as mine now.

The pool lights flickered, rippling across the water like something breathing beneath the surface. I set the RSVP on fire with my lighter, watched it curl and blacken, dropped it into the water where it hissed and died. The goldfish swam on, endlessly new, endlessly trapped, endlessly alive.

'Your drink's empty,' the woman said, and poured me more from a bottle she'd brought from the reception.

We sat there as the night deepened around us, two strangers at the bottom of a wedding we couldn't bring ourselves to leave, swimming through the dark, pretending it was enough to simply keep moving forward.