Thirty Dirty Fish Tanks, Part 1

Five months after the end of my marriage, I was ready for a fling. Not a forever person. Not even necessarily a second date. I was mostly looking for evidence that I was still visible. The previous several months had done little for my confidence. First came the slow disappearance of feeling desired inside my marriage. Then came another man who flirted with me enthusiastically over Facebook Messenger only to vanish the moment I suggested we meet in person. At that point, I wasn't entirely sure whether I wanted a man or simply reassurance that men still wanted me.

That reassurance arrived in the form of a green zombie.

It was my friend Kristina's fortieth birthday, and the flawlessly executed theme was Enchanted Forest Zombie Attack. Twinkle lights hung from the trees. A giant canvas tent glowed softly on the lawn, inviting guests inside to pull oracle cards. A fire crackled in the distance, welcoming anyone who needed warmth or a good conversation. Blood dripped from the charcuterie board.

Some people leaned hard into the zombie aesthetic, others into the enchanted forest. Kristina somehow managed to be both at once, complete with fairy wings and marbled grey stage make-up that covered her whole body. I wore a floor-length velvet dress, a sparkling silver shawl, and enough bloody temporary tattoo wounds to suggest that if I wasn't undead, I was at least having a rough week.

Despite all the dead characters wandering around me, I felt startlingly alive. After months spent trying to keep my life from falling apart, it was a relief to be frivolous, to wear fake blood instead of hemorrhaging.

I was talking with a friend I'd met at that very spot a few months earlier. We were deep in a conversation about consciousness work when the green zombie walked past us. Then he stopped. Then he doubled back.

"Did you just say, 'the mushroom made me wait?'"

Of all the conversations happening at the party, my bizarre assertion about the agency of mushrooms was the one he'd chosen to interrupt.

"Yes," I said, practically daring him to ask another question.

He did.

We spent the rest of the evening talking. I asked him about his favorite vacation (the Farrow Islands) and what he’d choose to be the best at in the world if he could (directing film). I told him about witchcraft—not the Hollywood version, but the version I had slowly come to know: that any magical ally, including a mushroom, has something to teach us if we're willing to pay close enough attention.

"I love how creative you are," he said.

No one had ever said that to me before. I carried those words around for weeks.

I was rusty at dating and no longer trusted myself to tell the difference between kindness, attraction, curiosity, and wishful thinking. I also wasn't entirely sure whether I was interested in him or simply enjoyed being looked at with that much attention. My own inner compass had become so unreliable that I found myself quietly following his instead.

Throughout the evening, he had developed a habit of disappearing for stretches of time before wandering back into my orbit. Every time he vanished, I caught myself scanning the party for him before I even realized I was doing it, like an overly optimistic golden retriever who had momentarily lost sight of her person. Maybe he meant to create that anticipation. Maybe he didn't. Either way, it worked.

At one point we found ourselves standing side by side near the fire. I absentmindedly lifted my plastic cup of water to my mouth and chewed on the rim while I waited for him to say whatever it was he was clearly winding up to say.

He leaned toward me and whispered into my ear. "I like to tease."

Somewhere underneath the zombie makeup, my entire face betrayed me. Apparently my nervous system had been waiting years to hear those four words. I leaned toward him. "I like to be teased."

At the end of the night, we exchanged numbers. Before I'd made it all the way home, my phone rang. It was him.

We spent the drive replaying the evening, comparing notes about what each of us had been thinking while the night unfolded.

"When you put that cup in your mouth?" he said. "Damn. That's when I knew you were into me."

I wasn't entirely convinced that was true on my end, but I loved getting a glimpse into his inner world. I've always been curious about what people are thinking while they're doing something. Tell me the story your mind was telling while we stood beside the fire. Tell me what you almost said but didn't. Tell me why you doubled back after overhearing one strange sentence about a mushroom.

At the time, I mistook that feeling—that joy of being invited into someone else's interior world—for intimacy. I hadn't yet learned to ask whether he was equally interested in entering mine.

Over the next several weeks, we settled into a rhythm. Almost every evening, my phone rang. We talked for hours.

I told him about my divorce, about the strange grief of losing not only a marriage, but the version of myself who had believed it would last forever. He told me about his son, whose mother had moved far enough away that visits had slowly become memories instead of weekends. We traded stories the way people do when they're trying to determine whether another human being is safe enough to hand a few tender pieces of themselves to. We became human to each other. Or at least, that's what I believed at the time.

He lived three hours away but found himself in the Boston area often for acting jobs. One week he was wrapping a role in Super Troopers 3 when he suggested we meet in Manchester and spend the night together.

I told my mother where I was going with far more enthusiasm than embarrassment. "I'm spending the night with a man I met at a zombie party."

She took it remarkably well.

I packed an overnight bag, slipped on a black blazer over a red lace teddy, and started the drive feeling equal parts nervous and delighted with myself. There was something wonderfully life-affirming about wanting someone after so much loss. It felt less like rebellion than recovery.

Halfway there, my phone buzzed. He was running behind. The glue they had used in his hair during filming, he explained, was putting up far more of a fight than expected.

Then another text. He was exhausted.

I felt my stomach tighten.

Not again.

My mind had become exquisitely sensitive to even the faintest scent of rejection. Every delayed text felt like the opening notes of a familiar song. Then another message appeared.

Can you grab me an energy drink on your way?

The panic dissolved almost immediately. He still wanted to see me, but in its place, another feeling quietly surfaced. Huh. I barely knew this man. Was I already running his errands? The thought landed somewhere in the back of my mind before I quickly filed it away under You're overthinking this, Emily. After all, I had ignored flags of every conceivable color before. Why stop now?

Instead, I decided to romanticize the assignment. Finding the right gas station became a scavenger hunt. Choosing the energy drink became foreplay. If this relationship had a superpower, it was my ability to turn almost any questionable decision into an adventure.

That night, he showed up with handcuffs, a blindfold, and a genuine commitment to making good on his promise that he liked to tease.

In the candlelit hotel room, he asked me to beg for what I wanted. When I did, I didn’t just feel desired; I felt awake. There are seasons of heartbreak when parts of you quietly go numb. That night, one of those parts stretched, yawned, and remembered it was still alive.

The next morning, we walked to breakfast. At one point, he insisted on walking on the side of the sidewalk closest to traffic in case a rogue car somehow launched itself over the curb. It was objectively ridiculous, but I found it deeply charming.

When we got lost looking for the diner, he didn't sigh or pull out his phone. Instead, he pulled us into a nearby bank. As soon as we entered, heads turned; his charisma was magnetic. Without a hint of embarrassment or modesty, he asked a woman waiting in line for directions. As we turned to leave, she smiled. "You two make a cute couple."

I smiled back. Maybe we did.

Inside the diner, somewhere between the shared omelet and the breakfast sandwich, I noticed he was wearing his designer sunglasses indoors. It struck me then how little I actually knew about him. Sometimes attraction has a funny way of filling in the blanks with optimism.

Over breakfast, he told me about the project he was most excited about. He was remaking the opening scene from the original Super Troopers, the one where three young stoners get pulled over and mercilessly messed with by the troopers. His version would replace the twenty-year-old men with three women in their thirties. He wanted to direct and star in it himself and had already recruited several friends to play the leads. As he talked, his whole face lit up.

I loved that.

"So..." I asked, trying to sound only mildly hopeful,"Could I be involved?"

Now, let me be clear. I did not harbor secret dreams of becoming an actress. I harbored secret dreams of collecting interesting stories, and "accidentally ending up in an indie parody of Super Troopers" certainly qualified.

He thought for a second. "Maybe you could be the snack wench."

I laughed.

He didn't.

"Oh," I said. He wasn't kidding.

Now, I would love to tell you that thirty-six-year-old Emily politely thanked him for the opportunity, reflected on whether "snack wench" aligned with her gifts and aspirations, and declined with grace. Unfortunately, this was thirty-six-year-old Emily before several very important lessons.

"Sure," I said. Curiosity has always been both my greatest teacher and my most convincing accomplice.

As the weekend approached, he sent me the script. I curled up on the couch, genuinely excited to read it.

And here's where I want to tread carefully. I don't think amateur artists should be mocked for making amateur art. Every creative person has to begin somewhere. I've written plenty of things that deserved to stay safely inside a laptop folder.

That wasn't what jumped out at me. What caught my attention was the women. Or rather...the absence of them. The dialogue felt as though someone had taken the words originally spoken by twenty-year-old men, crossed out the names, and written "Jennifer," "Ashley," and "Melissa" above them.

These weren't women in their thirties. They were men wearing women's name tags.

I found myself laughing, and not because the jokes landed, but because I couldn't imagine a single woman I knew reacting this way. Women in their thirties don't panic about getting caught with drugs the way twenty-year-old men do. We immediately start wondering who has to work tomorrow. Or whether our mothers are somehow going to find out. Or if this is somehow going to affect our health insurance. We catastrophize with considerably more administrative detail.

The more I read, the more a different script began writing itself in my head. Eventually I stopped resisting and opened my laptop. Before I knew it, I'd rewritten the entire scene. I read it to myself and giggled; I hadn’t written anything that made me laugh in a long time, and I was excited. Excited to collaborate. Excited to share with him a piece of writing his work had inspired me to write. Excited to enter his creative world the same way he'd entered mine that night at the zombie party when he asked about the mushroom.

I sent him my version. Then I waited.

A day passed.

Nothing.

Another day.

Still nothing.

Looking back, I'm struck less by the silence than by what I wanted so badly. It wasn't for him necessarily to use my ideas. It was for him to be curious about them, to ask why I'd changed something, to tell me what resonated, to disagree, even. Anything that suggested he wanted to step inside my imagination the way I had so eagerly stepped inside his.

Instead, the script disappeared into the same silence where so many of my own inner worlds had quietly gone before.

At the time, though, I told myself it didn't matter. This was his project, his moment. I could be supportive. Besides, I was still getting to spend the weekend making a movie. Or, as it turned out...bringing snacks.

When the weekend of filming finally arrived, I drove the three hours to his apartment. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Based on the evidence I'd gathered so far—which admittedly consisted of designer clothes, sunglasses worn indoors, intermittent acting jobs, and an almost supernatural confidence—I had narrowed the possibilities down to one of two extremes. Either he was secretly wealthy... or secretly homeless. There did not seem to be a middle option.

As it turned out... there wasn't.

He opened the apartment door. I smiled. Then I looked past him.

Reader.

There are homes where you immediately want to kick off your shoes, curl up on the couch, and ask if they have any tea.

This was not one of those homes.

A thin layer of grime seemed to coat every available surface. The kitchen table had disappeared beneath so many piles of things that I wasn't entirely convinced there still was a table underneath. Chairs had become decorative structures for holding more stuff. The air smelled unmistakably damp, as though mildew had quietly signed a year-long lease.

And then... the fish tanks.

There wasn't one. Or two. Or even the sort of ambitious six-tank setup that might make you think, Ah yes, this person has a hobby. There were dozens. Large aquariums lined the kitchen walls. More surrounded the bed. Every one of them was filled with water. Not one of them contained a fish. Only green. Green coating the glass. Green floating in the water. Green slowly reclaiming what had once been someone's careful creation.

I stared. He followed my gaze.

"Sorry about the fish tanks," he said. "My son and I used to build them together."

And just like that...they weren't fish tanks anymore. They were grief.

Sometimes grief doesn't look like crying. Sometimes it looks like thirty abandoned aquariums that no one has had the heart to empty.

I wish I could tell you that this was the moment my intuition gently took me by the shoulders and said, "Emily... sweetheart... perhaps we don't spend the weekend in the algae museum."

It tried. It really did.

But curiosity and I have had a long, codependent relationship. Besides, I had already driven three hours. There is a surprising amount of psychological momentum behind a long drive.

I carried my overnight bag into the bedroom, looking for somewhere to put it. The bed occupied most of the room. The rest was fish tanks. Fish tanks to the left. Fish tanks to the right. Fish tanks arranged around the bed like some sort of deeply haunted moat.

Eventually I found a patch of floor approximately the size of a dinner plate and gently lowered my bag onto it.

Just then, he looked down at his phone and muttered something under his breath.

"One of my actors just bailed."

He started typing.

I stood there quietly, trying not to look too interested. Then a thought fluttered through my mind...maybe…

He looked up. There it was.

And with the tiniest trace of hope in his voice, he asked the question, "Would you want to be in the film tomorrow?"

Now, if you've ever met a golden retriever, you know that they have a remarkable ability to appear patient while every molecule in their body is already halfway to the tennis ball. That was me. I attempted what I believed was a measured, thoughtful pause.

"Yeah," I said. "I'd like to have that experience." Inside, however...I was already accepting the imaginary Oscar.

***

Part Two next week