Freshman year of college to cheer me up Mitch got me a beta fish. He was an iridescent blue with short fins, and we painstakingly searching the internet for the perfect name.  I wanted to avoid the mistake of hastily titling a pet. I did that once, with “Macaulay,” after Macaulay Kulkin…I was seven. It took days to decide, and still the name we came up with was stupid. Vachel.

We thought it was awesome because it’s French for “tender of the cows,” which has absolutely nothing to do with a fish. I guess it’s ok though because  it’s not like there would ever have been the occasion to use his name like “Hey, Vachel, Do something!” because he was pretty predictable.  The scary thing was that we got that name off of a baby names website, so at some point I’m sure parents somewhere in the world went on there and were like “Vachel…yeah.” for a human baby.

Anyway, Vachel’s home was a circular bowl on my desk in Gilmore Hall. When I went on my computer, he would sit there, gills flicking every so often letting me know that he was still alive. I’d like to think that he enjoyed the teal marbles on the bottom of the bowl that matched his body and a lone pink plastic plant in the middle that he sat by, all day.

From his post, Vachel watched  me flounder awkwardly through college. My Freshman year at Hope was a struggle against what was comparable to another year of high school. I lived in Gilmore, a coddling atmosphere, where the three most stringent rules dealt with the prevention of alcohol consumption at all costs, the limitation of  any and all male to female contact outside of talking and hand holding, and noise restrictions during “quiet time.” Like a plant in a pop bottle terrarium, there was a limit to how much I was allowed to grow, and I did not cross it.

I read the first essay that I wrote in college recently, detailing how I viewed my life and what my goals were for the future, and could only laugh (and throw up in my mouth a little bit) at what a little douche bag I had been.

• Heartily earning at least B’s
• Becoming a “proficient” writer
• Identify myself as an “Exceptionally centered individual.

Towards the end of the school year, Vachel started swimming oddly. He tilted more and more to his side. Mitch said it had something to do with his swim bladder, which I didn’t even know fish had. When I moved home after freshman year for the summer, I set Vachel up by my bedroom window so that he could gaze at nature in what I had assumed were to be his final days. As time passed Vachel gradually tilted further and further over until he swam completely sideways. He was typically limited to swimming in circles, but on rare occasions he would somehow shoot himself down to the bottom of the bowl, only to float back to the top, sideways.

Every day of the summer I woke up and checked the bowl, thoroughly expecting Vachel to be dead.

Every day, for the first part of the summer, I was wrong.

Days turned into weeks, and then months; Vachel just wouldn’t let go. I would leave on weekends sometimes and say goodbye to him before I left,  kiss the bowl even,  expecting it to be that last time we would ever see each other. Every time I returned however, there he was flipping around on his side like an idiot.  Vachel lived for what seemed like forever in the weirdest way, and after awhile I just assumed that he just wasn’t going to die, ever.  You don’t seriously expect things to die, when you look at the world from the safety of a terrarium. I didn’t even know what DIE meant yet.

On the morning of Sam’s funeral, I looked in Vachel’s bowl to say hello, greeted only by his un-moving, deader than dead fish corpse.  “Fuck,” was my only word as I reached my hand in the bowl, stomped over to the bathroom and watched him swirl away into oblivion.  Vachel was the only fish I couldn’t bury.

Luciana, 23