What We Keep

The vitamin bottle sat on his nightstand for three weeks after David moved out. Orange prescription label, half-full tablets that were supposed to fix what was broken between us. I swallowed one each morning with coffee, the way he'd told me to, as if ritual alone could manufacture the closeness we'd lost.

Our goldfish — a carnival prize from the first year we dated, the one we'd jokingly named Emperor because of his flowing orange fins — kept circling his bowl in the corner of the living room. Seven years of that fish, outlasting apartments, jobs, friends who drifted away. Now he outlasted us too.

"It's just a fish," David had said when I asked who'd keep him. He hadn't even looked back from packing his boxes.

But Emperor was the only one who witnessed it all: the fights that started with dishes and ended in existential accusations, the sex that became dutiful, the nights we lay back-to-back in the same bed feeling continents apart. The fish knew the trajectory before I did.

I stood before the medication cabinet now, David's vitamins lined up beside my own. His routines: the vitamin D he swore by, the fish oil for his heart. All those things he swallowed to keep himself intact, to bear the weight of being. None of them worked. Not on him, not on us.

The therapist said grieving a relationship is like bearing a child: it grows, it demands attention, it reshapes you from the inside. But at least a child eventually leaves on its own terms.

Emperor surfaced at the top of his bowl, mouth opening and closing in silent repetition. I sprinkled flakes over the water. Another morning, another feeding, another small act of care for something that stayed when everything else receded.

The bottle on the nightstand was empty now. I swallowed the last vitamin with wine instead of coffee. Some rituals demand their own revision.