What the Goldfish Remember

Maya watched him from the doorway, her tangled hair a dark halo against the bathroom light. She'd started coloring it again last month—the first gray strand had appeared on her thirty-fifth birthday, and suddenly she couldn't stop seeing them everywhere. Mark was at the sink, leaning closer to the mirror than she liked him to, tweezing something from his chin. Another stray hair, another reminder.

"You're doing it again," she said.

"What?"

"Pretending you don't see them. The lines around your eyes. The way your hair's thinning. We're getting old, Mark."

He turned, and in the harsh fluorescent light, she saw how tired he looked. How long they'd both been tired. "Thirty-five isn't old, Maya."

"It is when you feel like you've already lived your best life at twenty-five."

They'd stopped speaking after that—another conversation abandoned like so many others. Later, she found him in the kitchen, feeding the goldfish their daughter had won at the fair three years ago. The fish swam in endless circles, six of them in a too-small bowl, their orange scales flashing like sequins in the morning light.

"They die if you overfeed them," he said, not looking up. "I looked it up. They pretend they're hungry, but they're really just... bored."

"Goldfish don't get bored."

"That's what people think. But apparently, they remember things for months. Years, maybe. They recognize faces. They get depressed."

He tapped the glass, and the fish scattered. "Sometimes I think about what it would be like. To just forget everything every five minutes. To just keep swimming in circles, thinking this water's new, thinking you're discovering it for the first time."

Maya stepped closer, hip bumping the counter. The coffee maker beeped—another morning ritual completed without either of them noticing.

"Would that be better?" she asked. "Not remembering?"

"I don't know." He finally looked at her, really looked at her. "But sometimes I wonder if we're just swimming in different bowls."

The orange fish pressed its mouth to the glass, opening and closing. Opening and closing.

"We could get a bigger tank," she said quietly. "We could start over."

He turned off the kitchen light, and in the gray dawn filtering through the blinds, he reached for her hand. His fingers found hers in the dark, and she thought about memory, about goldfish, about whether it mattered who forgot what first.