It wasn’t even my fish, it was my roommates.
Red and small, he was a betta fish. He had beautiful gills and a long body. We didn’t even name him because we expected him to die within days, but that wasn’t the case.
“Don’t get attached to the stupid fish,” my mom told me when I told her about our new fish. At first I didn’t, because after all, it’s just a stupid fish. All it does is swim around in a small tank and eat its little pebbles.
And I never liked fish as pets, there was no point to them. You can’t hold or pet them, so what was a fish really contributing to people’s day-to-day lives?
That being said, I didn’t go near the fish for the first week. I would tell my friends my roommate got a fish, almost as a joke, like “haha, that’s pathetic.”
But one day I woke up and I felt lonelier than ever. My roommate was out of town for the weekend, and there was that lump in my throat and sinking in my chest. I wanted to stay in bed and never leave, and being the only one in the apartment for the weekend was killing me.
Finally, I got out of bed and walked to the living room, and that’s when I saw the fish tank in the corner. A part of me didn’t want to go over to it, but I had nothing better to do at the time. So I walked over to the small fish tank and stood there, just staring at the fish.
The fish I didn’t even want in the first place.
He wasn’t moving, which I later learned was one of his “quirks.” I thought he was dead, but apparently, he just doesn’t like to move a lot. Figures.
So there I was, just staring at him. At one point I placed my finger on the tank, and the fish followed it. A smile spread across my face.
It was a heartwarming feeling. The way he moved his little gills to swim, how it looked like he was trying so hard to swim to my finger, but he was actually swimming very slowly.
I decided to sit and observe the fish for longer. The lonely feeling I had earlier was replaced with peace and comfort. Seeing such a delicate yet simple creature just existing almost felt eye-opening.
To see something with no thoughts whatsoever just living life, while I have thousands of thoughts running through my mind at one given moment, I had never seen it before.
A couple of times I would feed the fish, shaking the bottle of food so that the orange pellets fell into his tank. He would swim up to the surface and quickly inhale the pellet, and sometimes he would even spit it out after. I guess he was a picky eater.
The fish I didn’t want in the first place then became my comfort fish. Every morning I woke up, I would walk over to the tank, and as if on cue, he would swim over to face me; it became our daily routine. And when I put my finger on the glass, he was already there.