What the Fish Knows

The goldfish stares at me through the curved glass, its orange scales catching the morning light. Marcus left it behind when he moved out three weeks ago, along with his half of the bookshelf and most of the hope I'd been storing up for us. 'You take him,' he'd said, already halfway out the door. 'I'm no good at keeping things alive.'

I'm no good at it either, apparently.

I go running every morning now, my feet hitting the pavement in a rhythm that almost drowns out the silence of this apartment. The route takes me past the pond where we used to feed the ducks, where I'd sit on his lap and he'd promise me things about forever that neither of us really meant. The water there is murky, choked with algae and the debris of other people's picnics.

This morning, it's raining. I run anyway, my shirt plastered to my skin, water dripping from my hair into my eyes. Everything looks liquid through the blur—the streetlights, the passing cars, the reflection of myself in shop windows. A woman who runs because stopping means feeling.

When I return, breathless and soaked, the goldfish is still there, still swimming in endless circles around his tiny kingdom. He doesn't remember Marcus. He doesn't remember the way this apartment used to smell like coffee and sex and possibility. He only knows this glass world, these artificial plants, the pinch of flakes I drop into the water twice a day.

I stare at him and wonder if he's the lucky one. Nothing hurts when you can't remember anything beyond seven seconds. No past to haunt you, no future to dread. Just this moment, this water, this small existence.

'You and me both, buddy,' I whisper, my finger tracing the cold glass.

He bubbles at the surface, mouth opening and closing like he's trying to speak, trying to tell me something about survival, about adaptation, about how to live in a container that's too small when what you really need is an ocean.

Tomorrow I'll run again. Tomorrow I'll feed him and go to work and pretend I'm not drowning in the space between who I was and who I'm becoming. But for now, I watch him swim, and something in the way he keeps moving despite everything makes it possible to keep breathing too.