After years of swimming in circles, Codi, Old Hayman’s goldfish, reluctantly retired.
When the sun crept in that day, she noticed the water was smaller than it used to be, and the walls had become a bit too familiar. Codi had memorized every corner of the small bowl Old Hayman’s daughter put her in after Hayman’s passing. She was now accustomed to the routine: the sprinkle of food that fell in like confetti from a careless sky. Hayman’s daughter, Priscy, never gave her a ceremony that deserved applause. The girl was a bore. She never cared about Codi like Old Hayman did.
Codi breathed, and her breath caused the water to ripple. She remembered how Old Hayman used to change her bowls every now and then, the designs he meticulously crafted and put in them just for her to have a show. But since his passing, she has known no fun. Just the routine of eating and swimming around the same four walls every day. Codi found the routine exhausting.
One time, while Priscy sat across from her, she performed. She swam and dived and twirled and made ripples, but Priscy didn’t seem to care. She cared more about her smoke than she did Codi. Her room could pass for a slum. Stubs of smoke were more like a floor design; one could barely see the aged oak boards. Clothes, damp and dry, mixed on the couch and scattered across the floor. Each time she returned from work, she was too exhausted to care, so she shoved them to one side and dropped on the bed, snoring away, giving Codi no care.
A fountain stood outside the building, large, bright, but unreachable to Codi, who longed for it. Maybe a small show there could get her another owner who cared. But three years went by, and Codi never went out of the stale box Priscy placed her in.
She’d been trying to perform, to cheer Priscy, but she never cared. Never smiled. Always wore a long face torn from exhaustion.
So that day, she simply stopped performing and floated near the surface. There was nothing new left to chase in that bowl. No unexplored territory or deeper water waiting. Mere repetition dressed as routine.
And I wonder sometimes if I, too, have been swimming like that.