What We Keep

The aquarium sat on the counter where the coffee maker used to be. Three orange goldfish swam in endless circles, their scales catching the morning light like fragments of a forgotten sunset. Sarah had bought them the week before she left, during that brief, strange period when she'd decided we needed a 'living thing that wouldn't disappoint us.'

I'd been swimming through grief for months now—some days drowning in it, others barely treading water. The therapist suggested vitamin D supplements, said seasonal depression was real even in July. She gave me a list of things that might help: sunlight, exercise, something to care for. I bought the vitamins. I kept the fish.

This morning, one of the goldfish floated at the top, its orange curve gleaming against the glass. I stared at it for ten minutes, coffee cooling in my hand, remembering Sarah's laugh when she'd brought them home. 'They're supposed to have three-second memories,' she'd said, pressing her warm shoulder against mine. 'Imagine that. Never holding onto anything long enough to hurt.'

But the fish weren't swimming in circles because they forgot where they'd been. They were swimming because there was nowhere else to go.

I flushed the dead fish down the toilet, watching it spiral away. Then I sat on the bathroom floor and swallowed a vitamin, imagining it dissolving through my system like time, like patience, like all the things we measure out in increments too small to notice until they're gone. The remaining two fish continued their laps, neon bright in the artificial light, perfect and eternal and trapped.

Later, I walked to the pet store and bought three more orange goldfish. The clerk asked if I had a tank ready. I thought about saying something profound—about how we're all just swimming in circles, about how the things we keep alive are sometimes the things that kill us. Instead I nodded, paid, and carried the plastic bag home, watching the new fish swim alongside the old ones, all of them orange and alive and forgetting, over and over again.