Three Seconds of Memory

The goldfish was dying, and Sarah was relieved.

It sat in a glass bowl on her desk at the pharmaceutical company, its orange scales dulling day by day. Three years of corporate wellness seminars, and she'd become expert at the language of vitality. Sell the promise of life extension while your own existence narrows to the size of a fishbowl.

'You need to take care of yourself,' David had told her the night he left, the words gentle but final. 'I can't watch you disappear anymore.'

So she started taking the vitamins. First a multivitamin, then B-complex, then the specialized blends the company manufactured. She swallowed them with morning coffee,午 lunch water, evening wine. A ritual of self-improvement that felt increasingly like eating her own ashes.

Outside her office window, summer lightning fractured the sky—sudden, brilliant, indifferent.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Mark in R&D, with whom she'd been having a desultory affair since March. 'Dinner tonight?'

Sarah stared at the goldfish, which had stopped swimming and now floated near the surface, its gills moving in slow, desperate rhythm. She thought about memory—how goldfish were said to have only three seconds of it, swimming in endless circles of new discovery. What a gift that would be. To not remember David's face as he packed his bags. To not remember the version of herself who'd once written poetry, who'd once believed she might become someone else entirely.

The storm broke.

Lightning struck something nearby—a transformer, maybe—and the office went dark. Emergency lights flickered on, casting everything in an eerie amber glow. Her colleagues cursed, reached for phones, called IT.

Sarah looked at the fishbowl. The goldfish was still.

She realized she couldn't remember the last time she'd felt something without immediately analyzing which vitamin or supplement or meditation app might fix it. The optimization of grief. The commodification of longing.

The fish was dead.

'Your body is a temple,' the posters in the breakroom proclaimed. Sarah laughed in the darkness. It was a temple, all right—empty, ornamental, housing a god who'd long since departed.

She didn't respond to Mark's text. Instead, she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and found the bottle of whiskey she kept for especially long Tuesdays. She poured a shot into her coffee mug and drank it standing at the window, watching lightning illuminate the parking lot.

For the first time in three years, she didn't take her evening vitamins.