What We Keep Circling

The dinner party had dwindled to three—Sarah, Marcus, and me—standing around the new aquarium Sarah had installed in the corner of her living room. Inside, a single goldfish moved through the water with that strange, relentless purpose goldfish have, as if somewhere ahead lay something it hadn't already seen a thousand times.

"His name is Geoffrey," Sarah said, tapping the glass. The fish didn't react. "Sometimes I think he's happier than any of us."

Marcus laughed, but his eyes found mine across the tank. We both knew she was talking about the divorce she'd finalized two weeks ago—her sudden freedom, her purchased apartment, her fish. We were the ones still married, still swimming through the same conversations we'd been having for seven years.

"You okay?" Marcus asked, his hand finding my lower back. The same way he'd touched me at our wedding, at the hospital when his mother died, at countless dinners where I'd felt myself becoming smaller, quieter, more like whatever version of me he needed.

"Fine," I said. The word felt like something already submerged, like it had been underwater for a long time.

Sarah poured more wine. "Remember when we were twenty and we thought the hardest thing would be deciding what to be? Now I'm thirty-four and the hardest thing is admitting what I already am."

Marcus squeezed my shoulder. His version of comfort. His version of control. Last week I'd found the messages on his phone—another woman, another round of I've-never-felt-this-way-before, another person who thought she was the only one. I hadn't told him yet. I was still swimming toward it, still circling the moment where everything would change.

The goldfish pressed its mouth to the glass, a perfect O.

"You have to bear it," Marcus was saying, something about work, something about responsibilities, something about the things adults do. "That's what being a grown-up is."

I looked at his hand on my back. I looked at Sarah, who had somehow become a stranger in the aftermath of her own catastrophe. I looked at the fish, endlessly circling its water, its whole world contained within something someone else had built.

Then I stepped away from his touch.

"Actually," I said. "I don't think I will."