What Bears Forget

Martha stood before the office aquarium, watching the goldfish navigate its plastic castle. The creature moved with the confident stupidity of something that had never known fear. Three seconds, she thought. The span of its memory. Imagine that luxury — to circle the same ceramic arch and find it astonishing every single time.

She checked her phone. No message from David. Three weeks since he'd walked out with his monogrammed shirts and the bear carving from their mantelpiece. The bear — a brutal chunk of red cedar he'd whittled during his midlife crisis phase — had been his favorite. "Strength," he'd called it, running his thumb over its jagged muzzle. "Old wisdom." Martha had mostly found it creepy, the way its glass eyes seemed to follow her across the room.

Now her therapist suggested she needed closure. A ritual. Burning his things seemed dramatic. Donating them felt like charity. So she'd done nothing.

The goldfish surfaced, mouth opening and closing like a silent scream.

"Same difference," she muttered.

Her phone lit up. David.

*Left the bear at your place. Can you mail it?*

Martha stared at the message. Twenty years of marriage reduced to a shipping label. She thought about the goldfish, swimming its endless circles, never remembering the water it had already traversed. Maybe the fish had it right. Maybe memory was the burden, not the liberation.

She walked to the breakroom, where an intern sat peeling an orange. The scent hit her like a physical blow — citrus and sunlight and the Sunday mornings David had made mimosas, back when they still made efforts. Back when love was something you performed instead of something you failed at.

"Mind if I?" Martha asked, and the intern slid her a segment.

She ate it slowly, letting the juice burn her tongue. The bear sat on her mantelpiece at home, its glass eyes watching nothing. She wouldn't mail it. She wouldn't burn it. She would leave it there, gathering dust, until even its glass eyes forgot what they were supposed to remember.

Some things, she decided, deserved to be forgotten repeatedly. Some things should only exist in three-second increments, astonishing and new each time, without the weight of everything that came before.

The goldfish turned its circle again. Martha swallowed the last of the orange and turned back to her desk, feeling almost light.