What We Keep

The goldfish circled its bowl, orange flashes against the gray wall of the apartment we'd shared for seven years. Marcus had won it at that carnival in Coney Island—the same night we'd gotten into the fight about whether to move to Chicago for his promotion. The fish had outlasted his tenure there, outlasted our marriage, and now it was the last thing left of us besides this empty apartment.

I poured the rest of my wine into the sink. The red liquid swirled down the drain like everything else we'd built together. Marcus had taken his baseball card collection yesterday, those pristine rectangles of cardboard worth more than my car. He'd left behind the fish, though. Said feeding it reminded him too much of what he couldn't sustain—something living that depended on him, that needed attention more than once every three days.

The cable bill lay on the counter, final notice. We'd canceled the service months ago when the arguments started, preferring silence to another evening of watching shows we weren't really watching, sitting on opposite ends of the couch like strangers sharing a waiting room. But the bills kept coming, just like the emails from his mother asking when we'd visit for Christmas, just like the dreams where I kept trying to call him and my phone had no signal.

'You're being a bull about this,' he'd said the last time we spoke, standing in this kitchen, his suitcase already by the door. 'Charging at everything, head down, refusing to see what's actually happening.'

What was happening was that I'd stopped being the person who laughed at his terrible jokes, who pretended to care about baseball statistics, who made his coffee exactly the way he liked it. And he'd stopped being the person who noticed when I was sad, who asked about my day and actually wanted to hear the answer.

The fish surfaced, gulping at the surface. Its water had grown cloudy. I'd meant to change it before the move, but there hadn't been time between the packing and the real estate listings and the crying in the shower.

I poured the fish and its cloudy water into a mason jar, grabbed my suitcase, and left the apartment key on the counter. Some things you carry with you. Some things you set free. And some things, you finally admit, were never really yours to keep.