The Waiters

Oh, you don't think I can turn the 18th anniversary of my dead fish into a poem about being ghosted? Hold my filtration system.

There’s a special place in my heart for those who wait.

For those amongst us who can turn a minute into five days, and those who spend every minute of those five days watching only sunsets, and story views, and people getting on with it. House cats, goldfish, waiters.

I had a goldfish kill itself once. Cirque du Soleiled itself directly into the bullseye of the bathroom mat. Mum said it wouldn’t have known what it was doing, that it wouldn’t have felt a thing, but I know better than that.

She would have felt the ‘I can’t do this anymore’ running through her little veins transform into action, into the winds of a few sweet seconds of freedom through her gills. Propelled past the toothbrushes, the succulent-yeilding ceramic frog, the potpourri. Bowl-bound no more.

‘Everyone looks like ants from up here!’, she thinks, as she witnesses our bathroom ant infestation for very first, and very last, time.

And as she does whatever the opposite of drowning is, all of her fishy memories flash before her one upward eye. It takes about 120 seconds to drown in air, so she got to think of all three memories at least forty times; Dad having a poo. Food cascading down from heaven. And smaller Dad with long hair crying for some reason.

And that’s it. Gone fishin’.
Sleeping with the mammals.
Goodbye fishy.

But it’s the waiters that I understand.

Jessica Blakeman and Victoria Craven watching on as their flailing friend stops flailing so much. I named my goldfish after the popular girls in school, you wouldn’t get it. The only things they had in common with them is that they haven’t yet left my hometown, and they’ve all gotten progressively less orange since 2016. Oh, and we’ve never spoken before, but that’s a given.

The two remaining fish now understand that flight an option, and yet they still don’t do it. True waiters from start to fin.

I get that, for it’s the waiting where hope lives. It might take the form of fantasy or delusion, of planning or pacing, depending on the day, but hope nonetheless.

The waiters know something the jumpers don’t. That tomorrow might contain a different hand lowering the flakes. A bigger bowl. A castle. A miracle. A text. Some microscopic shift in water chemistry that makes existence feel less like repeatedly kissing the same curved glass wall. The same dad having a poo.

Reader, please don’t mistake waiting for inaction. Not for inertia, nor apathy (they were my next two goldfish). For waiting is none of these things. The act of waiting is closer to the act of loving than anyone cares to admit. To hold almost nothing, for as long as possible — cradling a bundled blanket — unsure if the ache in your arms is from the contained beloved life anticipated, or just one of those damn TikTok shop weighted throws. The only contents you can be sure of are this: an idea, that one day, it might be different.

A life you want. Not a bowl, nor a carpet, but an ocean.

In loving memory.