Esteban. Omar and I referred to him as our ‘love child’. And he was. We loved our little blue fish dearly. Dusty (Om’s brother/our roommate) trained him to jump out of the water and eat fish food pellets off his finger. Esteban was like our very own circus animal.
One day, I was sitting at work and got a text from Om. He said Esteban died. I was so sad. Omar then goes on to text me that Esteban died because Dusty fed him a dead mosquito off the tip of his finger.
What the hell?! Why would you feed the fish a dead mosquito in the first place, knowing that mosquitos carry disease. It’s still beyond me.
About a week or so later, we got a second ‘love child’. Jaundis. He was yellow. Jaundis unfortunately was not able to come along for the trip when I moved out. However, Omie was nice enough to give me a ‘housewarming’ gift when i moved in my new condo.
A new fish.
I, of course, thought it was odd to have a fish that was given to me by an ex as a housewarming gift floating around in my condo, but that’s just me. No, wait…everyone that I told the story to thought it was odd as well. Some said I should flush the fish down the toilet- ALIVE. I would never do such a thing. So I kept him and named him Sebastian (as in Belle & Sebastian).
A few weeks later, I had a male friend over. We stayed up the whole night talking- we talked about music, families, what we were/weren’t doing with our lives, what made us happy and what we could do to be even happier with ourselves. The night was quite ‘uneventful’ aside from the talking, but I was content.
The next day as soon as my friend left, he calls me and tells me that one of our mutual friend’s sent him a text that said, “Did you see her fish?”
At the time, I was pissed that nosy people existed in the world. But if anyone asked me today if he saw my fish, I’d say, “Yes. Why, yes he did see Sebastian.”
