What We Keep in Water

The goldfish died on a Tuesday. I found him floating when I got home from work—Elena must have forgotten to feed him again, or maybe he'd just given up. His orange scales had gone dull, like old paint peeling off a rental wall.

"That's a sign," she said, not looking up from her phone. She was scrolling through something, probably checking her work email. The blue light made her face look washed out, smaller than I remembered.

"A sign of what?" I asked, flushing the fish down the toilet.

"That we're not ready for responsibility. That we can't keep anything alive."

That's when she told me she was sleeping with her boss.

We'd bought the goldfish three months ago, on impulse, after a friend's wedding where we'd both drunk too much champagne and slow-danced to 'Don't Stop Believin'.' We named him Carl because we couldn't agree on anything else. Now Carl was gone and so was the illusion.

I packed that night. She sat on the couch watching a baseball game—cable TV she insisted we needed despite Netflix existing, another relic of a life we were pretending to have. The dog, my brother's lab we were dog-sitting for the week, watched me fold shirts with concerned brown eyes. He was the only honest thing in the apartment.

"You're leaving?" she asked when I picked up my suitcase. It was the same suitcase I'd brought when I moved in, two years ago this month.

"Yeah."

"Because of the fish?"

"No, Elena. Because of the boss. Because of the last six months. Because I don't know which version of you is real anymore."

She didn't cry. That was the worst part—the complete absence of tears, like she'd already mourned us and forgotten to tell me.

I stayed at a motel that week, drove the dog to my brother's on Saturday. The fish bowl sat empty on the windowsill when I dropped off my key. The water had gone cloudy, like something was trying to grow there and couldn't.

Some things don't survive the transition from one life to another. You learn that eventually. You can keep the house, the cable, even the dog, but whatever made it a home—that's the first thing to go.

The next morning I bought another goldfish. I named him运气. Chinese for luck. My mother would've said it was too on-the-nose, but she wasn't speaking to me anymore either.

Some days, swimming in circles is the only way to keep moving forward.