What We Keep Alive

Maya found herself counting the gray hairs in her reflection—four new ones since David's funeral three weeks ago. She'd known him for thirty-seven years, since they were six and he'd poured orange juice into his mother's prize-winning goldfish bowl, convinced the fish wanted something sweet to drink. That was David. Always trying to fix things that weren't broken, usually by breaking them worse.

Now she stood in his apartment, surrounded by boxes, while his fiancée Sarah drank coffee at the kitchen counter. Sarah's hair was cut short, practical—the kind of change people made when they needed to believe they could control something about their grief.

"You were his oldest friend," Sarah said, not looking up. "He talked about you constantly."

Maya had wondered, during those last years when David's cancer had metastasized and their friendship had narrowed to hospital visits and awkward text messages, if he'd ever really known her at all. They'd drifted apart after college, then reconverged after his divorce, then drifted again. Friendship, she'd learned, wasn't a goldfish that could live indefinitely in a small bowl with only occasional feeding. It needed space, light, conditions that changed with seasons.

"He kept this," Sarah said, pushing something across the counter.

A photograph, curled at the edges. Maya, David, and a third person she didn't recognize, arms around each other's shoulders, drunk and young and impossibly confident that the world could be survived. She couldn't remember the night. She couldn't remember the third person's name.

"I don't know who that is," Maya said.

"That's the thing about memory, isn't it?" Sarah's voice cracked. "Some people become goldfish. They keep swimming through the same water, forgetting everything, but the water itself remembers. The container holds the shape of what used to be there."

Maya looked at the photograph again. The three of them, immortal in silver gelatin, their hair different colors then, their faces unlined by the deaths they'd survive and the ones they wouldn't. She thought of all the versions of herself she'd outlived, all the people she'd loved who had become ghosts haunting different rooms.

"I should go," she said.

"Take it," Sarah said. "He'd want you to have it."

Maya took the photograph. Later, at home, she would discover the third person in the picture was her own sister, dead eight years now. Some memories, she would realize, don't disappear—they just wait for you to circle back around, like fish in a bowl, like water holding the shape of something that's no longer there.