The Fish Tank

Photographer - Tobi Brun

The Fish Tank

I’m sixteen.

The boy’s dishwater blonde hair is just long enough to cover his eyes. I call him a boy, but my memory contains no detail of his age. He could be a man. He is older than me—that much I’m sure of. I let my mind tell me he is something between—on the verge, maybe, of
manhood or of an adolescence that will stretch on longer than it should. Or, of something else I can’t quite name. I gaze at him through the fringe of his unwashed hair. His eyes aren’t what hold my attention, but the knowledge that he’s high on painkillers. He parts his hair so strictly down the middle it makes me think of Moses striding through the Red Sea, sandals on dry ground. The boy rubs my feet between his warm palms. It’s intriguing—the way he asks permission to do this. My heartbeat hammers my ears. Without hearing myself say yes or no, I watch him reach down and slowly lift one of my feet into his lap, followed by the other. Another boy exists somewhere in the dark periphery, in the back of the trailer with my best friend, L.

She follows him, her hand in his, until they disappear into the bedroom at the end of the hallway. They stay quiet for a while, long enough for her absence to become a marked presence in my memory. As the boy rubs my feet, I stare across the room into a fish tank casting a purple glow into the dusk. Late summer clouds flare up inside the window frame above the aquarium, pink and orange, before they fade, and the sky goes slack. The darkness turns to nothing, a deep canvas for the pinprick of stars and the sound of cicadas wailing at the new moon. The purple glow reflects off the inky glass. In hindsight, I understand the nothing that happens that night is something. He, the boy with the hair parted in the middle, addicted to pills, doesn’t require anything of me but to lie still while he touches my feet. Yet, there is an unasked question—some dread I can’t put my finger on. I feel the purple lure of the fish tank stain me as I lie on that couch. It lodges in me then, leaning me toward neither red nor blue, but a sick leaching of both together—something secondary, a stalling in the middle. The purple is inextricable. I define it now as the yearning of my adolescence—the desire to be desired. I don’t want this boy, but I do want more than this.

Last year, I turned forty. Since then, I’ve been toying with the idea of reckoning, wondering what the enduring questions of my life are as I allow myself to peer over my shoulder, back into the blank spaces, the irrelevancies that seemed so important to my younger self. Why did I think certain trivialities were important and would remain so, even after the memory faded from view?

Out of the ether of my past, this foot rub materializes to something concrete, like an anchor keeping me in place, dropped somewhere deep into the purple glow of that fish tank. It marks time, denotes context. Now, I look back at myself and think, this is the first thing that ever happened to me. I am born here. But, really, this foot rub is the birth of my curiosity. About myself, about what can happen—about L. and what she does in the back bedroom with the boy she follows there. The question grows inside me—when will whatever is happening for her happen for me? When will a man look at me like that? Take me by the hand, lead me somewhere dark? When will I be chosen?

Something in the fish tank’s purple glow reminds me of a fever dream, some unknowable landscape unleashed in my psyche. There is the feeling of being sunk, delving under. Of something not quite right. It is like the flicker of a television into a dark room, only nothing moves. The purple should be banal—simply the color of the pebbles at the bottom of the aquarium flinging their hue on the far wall. But, nothing is always something, the way the color floats up, skims the surface of memory. The purple emerges from the depths. I imagine the fish study me through the bleary wall—they wonder why I let that boy touch me at all.

This—the fish tank and the foot rub—is the first of many times I’ll wait on L. That night marks the beginning of something I can’t yet see, how she is becoming older than me, even though we are a month apart—my birthday in June and hers in July—Cancer and Leo, the best of
friends. That night, when L. follows the boy back to that bedroom, down the dark hallway, she begins to know things I won’t know until much later. This widening distance between us plants the first seed of jealousy in me. Even though I can’t define it yet, I want her freedom. There is nothing holding her back. Where I am constrained internally, L. is always completely herself.

So much of who I am back then is wrapped up in almost. In falling short of what could happen, who I could be. L. is different—she acts, makes decisions. She goes places, does things. Has relationships with boys. I tag along, always an outsider. An observer. I am forever on the couch getting foot rubs from boys, while she is inside a boy’s room, doing something else. It seems to me that L. lives as if she has nothing to lose. Carefree, grown-up. Sophisticated, even when we are still too young to know what that means. She seems headed, sometimes, for destruction, but her consequences glitter like sunlight on a rain puddle. I want this lure, this shine. Sometimes—often—she follows the voice of the Sirens, but even when she crashes on the shore and burns like a shipwreck aflame on the horizon, it is a beautiful burning. She makes sure of that.

Now, I think back to the version of me who is there, staring into that aquarium. I wonder, what do know now that I didn’t know then? That night is near the beginning of something big and disastrous in L.’s life. But I am still on the verge, still looking for whatever it is that will catapult me into adulthood. I am still looking for the thing—the boy, the love—that will take me off the rails. I believe then that growing up comes hand in hand with heartbreak. On some level I am right. Something about the inertia in the scene frightens me. I can’t be bothered to say no to something I don’t want. I can’t be bothered to turn on the light or tell L. I don’t want to wait on her. Or to tell that boy no, I don’t want him to touch me.

Any difference in the realm of memory, any alteration, a slight shift, and the tectonic plates of the past can move. Everything I know could be different, shifted slightly to the left, just one degree off. But, then, I wonder, is it possible to remember something wrong? Or are things just how they are, and how I remember them is how they exist, hard and fast, in my memory— incorrect or not? That’s the kind of moment it is, looking into the fish tank, into the purple murk. It is pivotal, a hinge. Something in my perception tells me the fish tank and the foot rub isn’t all there is, isn’t the whole evening, the whole story. There is everything else, too—and, how I feel about it. L. is in the bedroom at the back of the house. In my mind this amounts to her being chosen. I am on the sofa cringing as the boy grazes each of my toes with the tips of his fingers. This is the first and most pronounced of many tiny moments of comparison. I don’t want to be chosen by the same boy who chooses L., I just want to be wanted, desired. And, I want to be anywhere else but here.

Whatever is right in front of me is there because of what lies behind me—I am a product of accretion, an accumulation of pasts. I am made of little litterings of light flung on the path after I already walked it, the half-dried footprints leading me through wet, disintegrating leaves. This single memory of having my feet rubbed is the context of all my accumulated selves at one point in time, staring into the swirling purple water. It comes to mind the way a shadow might materialize. An image floats up, out of the darkness, like a candescent creature in dim water. I’m surprised by the persistence of this memory—such a seemingly meaningless event, but an experience all the same. What other moments are there just like this, ones too insignificant to even remember?

I don’t want to imbue meaning into a scene that holds none—I can only say it was a turning point. A scene I look back on now and think oh yes, that happened. And, and then, everything changed. It’s a flag planted in the soil, marking the place where everything ended, and everything else began. It’s the kind of thing only picked up on the trail walking back, only noticed in hindsight, on the return journey. It comes to mind that I may never know what I was doing—when I let that boy rub my feet. The soft accumulation of my experience may never make sense to me.

Behind me, silhouettes creep slowly. The room I occupy—so recently filled with golden radiance—now brims with cool shadow. I watch as the dog follows a warm block of light cast from the storm door across the wood floor. The sun disappears, buried in blue. I sit wondering if what I feel is regret, or if it is simply the way time passes, how memory discards absence, abandons it on equal footing with presence.

Anna Oberg is a professional photographer based in Estes Park, Colorado. When she's not arranging family portraits with the perfect view of Long's Peak as backdrop, she focuses on writing tiny memories and small stories. She has been published in Hunger Mountain Review, The South Dakota Review, Mud Season Review, Pidgeonholes, Causeway Lit, The Maine Review, decomp Journal, The Festival Review, and Split Rock Review, among others.