I had two fears come true in the last twenty-four hours. This morning, I wasn’t looking, and for the first time ever I got on the wrong bus for work. It took me another three hours just to get back to where I started. I don’t know how late I’ll be here tonight.<\/p>\n
And last night my fish finally winged his way to The Land Where Fish Are Eternally Blessed. I don’t really know why–this was about the best his life has ever been. I’ve been changing his water regularly, feeding him once a day, and he hasn’t been moved in weeks.<\/p>\n
When he first started acting oddly, Maria and I googled frantically for betta diseases, and checked him for all the symptoms. There was a little while when we thought he had a fungal infection, but we proved ourselves wrong. For all appearances, he was a perfectly healthy fish, except didn’t swim around–he just hovered at the top or sank to the bottom of the bowl. He was still breathing when I left for work yesterday morning, and he wasn’t when I got home.<\/p>\n
I never liked the idea of flushing fish, so we gave him a burial, in a small cardboard box lined with paper towels. Maria suggested putting some of his things in with him, which we did: some of the red glass stones from the bottom of his bowl, and the little ceramic tank goblin.<\/p>\n
We closed the box, said thank you and goodbye, and slid him into the trash chute. I think it came open on the way down, because it made a lot of noise, like stones hitting the walls. I was proud of this; he went out like a rock star.<\/p>\n
He was only a fish, but since I’m a human, I ascribed to him more importance than fish usually get. He was a constant in almost-a-year of rapidly changing roommates. He was a dependent at a time when I very much needed to take care of something, as a means of being okay again myself. This was something Amanda knew, magically, empathically. In three years of gifts<\/a>, he was the best she ever gave to me. I very nearly named him Hope<\/a>.<\/p>\n I might get another betta eventually, but not until I have a bigger tank, a heater and a water filter. Some of the stuff I read while I was looking for symptoms the other night made me wonder how he lived this long at all (but then again, I’ve wondered how he lived through a lot of things).<\/p>\n He only started really flaring at a mirror a week and a half ago: he was learning to stand up for himself. When I had loud music on near him, he’d dance to it, out of time. He was quite a lot like me, or what I’d like to be: shy, red, beautiful, effortlessly able to forget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had two fears come true in the last twenty-four hours. This morning, I wasn’t looking, and for the first time ever I got on the wrong bus for work. It took me another three hours just to get back to where I started. I don’t know how late I’ll be here tonight. And last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110,47,31,29,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-idaho-the-fish","category-jon-and-amanda","category-landmarks","category-maria","category-tarc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}