If I could live life over again, I'd do so as a fish. What the eff is so great about a fish, she asked me, hiding beneath the covers on a Saturday morning. I told her that I didn't know. I don't know a lot of things. Sometimes she'll ask me about the constellations or my favorite part of her body, and I'll be forced to tell her that I don't know. We watch whole episodes of Jeopardy in which I don't know a thing. How long do fish live? she asked. I was going to give her that quote from Keats about butterflies and time, but I knew I'd screw it up. Five to fifteen years, I said, without looking it up.
Tell me more about it, she said. I'm bored, bored, bored, and we have nothing else to do. Tell me about being a fish. I was going to tell her anyway. She got up to go to the bathroom, and I told her what I thought about fish over the sound of her urine. Everyone is always saying that they'd like to fly, come back as something that can soar just beneath the clouds, but I'm afraid of heights. And what if you spent the entire time in your new eagle, hawk, or house finch body, just panicking about flying. You know, just thinking, "Shit, am I flying or am I falling." Just flapping your wings like some kind of insane bird because you're afraid that if you don't you're going to fall to your death. Imagine feeling like you were going to die all the time. I don't think I could come back as a bird.
Logically then, she said, returning to the bedroom, not wearing her top, wouldn't you be scared then of being a fish? Doesn't it follow that you'd constantly be living in fear of drowning? Can you imagine swimming around wondering where your next breath is going to come from?
I told her that maybe I'd be a whale, but then I started wondering whether whales were terrified over where their next breath would come from. And if you think about whales, swimming in all that damn ocean, the overwhelming feeling that I get is one of loneliness. Whales make me lonely. But then, sometimes commercials about fabric softeners where the mother is hugging their child's clothes before they go away to school make me lonely. Maybe loneliness is a precondition of existence.
You're off topic, she said, rolling onto her side, propping her head--her hair falling like bits of light on water. I'd be a fish because the world is covered mostly by water. Just think, if you were bored and wanted a change, you could move further away than Australia. You could move to the Mariana trench and no one would ever find you. She said that I had a basic misunderstanding of fish that she'd watched something on the Discovery Channel about certain types of fish that live at the bottom of the ocean vs. the top of the ocean. You either had a lantern on your head and lived at the bottom or were kind of colorful and lived at the top and were possibly eaten by a whale. You kind of had to pick one or the other. You couldn't be one type of fish and then suddenly change your stripes and become another. I told her that I'd seen fish do this very thing, and she said she was speaking metaphorically. She was so lovely that morning, so lovely.
I told her that she'd convinced me that I didn't want to come back as a fish. Why are you so lovely? I asked her. She was looking at her phone, only half-listening. I'm lovely because I work at it, she said. I work and work and work at it. I work at everything. And to what end? she said, looking out our dusty window at a city full of people who don't know anything about us.
Within a month of two she'd moved all of her things to Tuscon. I sold the place that we'd been living in and started working a night shift as a janitor in an aquarium. At first, all I did was mop the floors and walk past the tanks. After a few weeks I'd started to stand at the edge of the glass, peering in at the fish going on about their business, whatever the hell fish business was. Finally, when I'd been there a few months, after I'd mopped the floors, I'd turn out the last of the lights, shed my clothes, and swim inside the tanks. The fish feel strange at first, harder in ways than you might imagine. Something about water makes you feel as though they should slide by, but they are scaly, rough. But I should tell you that after a while the fish and the rays start to get used to you, and I found, that by going in night after night, I was able to stay under for longer and longer. I thought, as I stared from inside the tank out at my clothes, my hand up against the glass--smooth, cool--that eventually I'd stay down in this tank forever. Some day, a group of school children or business men in fancy suits would walk by the tank and point to me, and I wouldn't be the loneliest person on the face of the earth. I'd be a fish swimming in a tank, preparing myself for whatever comes next.
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