Spalding

I acquired Spalding a couple months after I graduated college. I didn’t really want to keep him. But all of a sudden, I found myself mother to an orange betta fish who was nearing the end of his life.

I met Spalding only two weeks after I met my boyfriend. The first few days of Patrick’s and my relationship included some odd, yet meaningful, life events: he was the first person to message me on Tinder, it was my first ever Tinder date, and against all odds it went extraordinarily well; then, he got his wisdom teeth out a few days later, on our first Valentine’s Day together, and a couple days later he received a betta fish as a belated birthday present from one of his best friends. Spalding was pretty much there from the beginning.

An Arizona native, Patrick is a huge Phoenix Suns fan, so he named his new orange fish after the then-official basketball of the NBA. This was when Patrick lived alone in a studio apartment in Van Nuys. Perched on top of the shelves right next to the TV, Spalding was there to watch every game with Patrick, even when no one else could join him. When Devin Booker scored 70 points in one game, when Dragan Bender turned out to be one of the biggest Suns busts, when we got the first pick in the draft, Spalding had a front row seat every time.

Spalding wasn’t a particularly cute pet. He was nice to look at from afar, a reddish-orange delicate flame dancing around the narrow tank. But once you got up close and noticed his beady little eyes, his permanent frown, the frayed edges of his fins, he was a bit unnerving. I bought him a leaf hammock to stick on the side of his tank to liven up his living space and give him a little relief from the constant swimming that I thought might be taking a toll on his physical appearance. He never got prettier, but he did love his leaf hammock.

Eventually, Patrick moved into a house with friends, and of course, Spalding did too. While living at that house, Patrick and his roommates found 4 kittens in their backyard, with no mother cat to be found. The kittens were wild, but they managed to bring them into the house. They found a home for one, my roommates and I fostered and re-homed one, and Patrick and his roommates ended up keeping the last two, whom they named Rocket and Henry.

I’m a cat-lover, so caring for our foster kitten and for Rocket and Henry gave me unmatched joy. When our focus shifted to helping the wild kittens acclimate to domestic life in a house of four twenty-something year old guys, Spalding camouflaged into the background. Our delicate orange flame danced around his tank in the bedroom while Patrick, his roommates, and I watched basketball games in the living room.

We graduated college that May, a year and a half after Patrick got Spalding. Patrick moved into a new apartment with the same guys, the two cats, and, of course, Spalding. I moved into the basement of my parents’ house in Mar Vista, not to play into the trope of the English major graduate. We joked that we were in a long-distance relationship being on near opposite ends of LA, a joke which our friends in legitimate long-distance relationships weren’t so amused by. My friends dispersed around the city, the state, the country, and now it was time to free-fall into the next chapter of life--a chapter that had yet to be written out for me; a chapter that I needed to pick up the pen and write myself.

For the following summer months, I spent my days at various cafes around LA applying for random jobs in wildly different fields, some that I didn’t even have any interest in, casting the widest net in order to see what came back. Though in the process of doing this every day I convinced myself I could never work well as a freelancer, I did enjoy getting out of the house every day, ordering an overpriced latte or pot of tea (and if I was at Stories in Echo Park, the Jammin’ Grilled Cheese sandwich), and people-watching while I deluded myself into thinking I was being productive. Eventually, I landed a job, and my days of eating grilled cheese with jam while people-watching came to an end.

One October day, I was at Patrick’s after work when we noticed the water level in Spalding’s tank was really low, and his leaf hammock was missing. The cover of his tank was slightly ajar. I searched around for the cats and found Rocket lying on his back outstretched, inviting belly rubs, and Henry curled up on the couch licking his paws. They looked the same as they always did, but somehow, I thought, guiltier. It was clear--the cats had been bullying Spalding. My throat tightened up. I leaned my head against Patrick’s chest as he wrapped me in a hug. We filled his tank back up to the normal water level, and without having to say a word, we both knew that this would be Spalding’s last night in Patrick’s apartment for a while.

I had kept Spalding for a few days to a few weeks at a time when Patrick would drive home to Arizona to visit his family every so often. But we knew this time was different. We didn’t know how to solve the issue with the cats. The only option would be to keep Spalding in the bathroom and keep the door shut, but that just felt unfair to Spalding. Once adjacent to the TV, in on all the action during the NBA games, now Spalding would be relegated to the cramped yellowish bathroom with nothing to keep him entertained. It also didn’t seem entirely sanitary.

I drove home with Spalding the next morning. His tank fit perfectly snug in Patrick’s cup holder, but mine wasn’t big enough, so I placed the tank in between my thighs and squeezed, praying the whole way that I wouldn’t hit any potholes as I drove from Glendale back to my home in Mar Vista.

I had never really grown up with pets. My dad is allergic to cats and dogs, and so was I for most of my childhood. My older sister got a purple and blue betta fish as a party favor from a friend’s birthday party when she was in elementary school. My mom wasn’t too pleased about it, but nevertheless, Augusta became a part of the family. Laila adored Augusta, gazed at her every day. I was really young at the time, and for whatever reason, wasn’t as enthralled by Augusta as Laila was. I was off imagining dramatic scenes between my Polly Pocket and Betty Spaghetty dolls, stealing glances over at Laila who was desperately trying to play with Augusta as best as any pre-teen could possibly play with a pet fish.

Augusta was with us for 5 years. The average lifespan of a betta fish is 3-5 years. According to my mom, when August died, she floated belly up, decaying in her own tank for two days before Laila was willing to let my mom flush her down the toilet. I don’t remember this. All I remember is one day Augusta was there, and the next day she was gone, apparently in fishy heaven.

When I got home, I placed Spalding in the window sill in my living room, thinking he might enjoy the view of the backyard. I hesitated before looking at him in his tank up close.

Spalding changed after what I can only surmise was a traumatic experience for him. I had Googled what a healthy betta fish looked like as opposed to an unhealthy one, and he exhibited all the signs of a stressed betta fish. (Through my research, I also learned that Augusta was most likely a male, not female, betta fish.) His fiery red-orange color was fading to a pale tangerine with horizontal dark and light stress stripes. He swam around spastically, his fins fluttering around as if he was looking for something to hold onto. He no longer had his leaf hammock. Somehow his natural frown seemed even more pronounced. For a second, it even seemed like he had a furrowed brow.

I left the house after getting Spalding situated to go run errands and see some friends. When I got back that evening and checked on Spalding, he was still. Normally he swam around, excited to see me. My eyes widened. I pushed back the stray hairs from around my face. I put a few pebbles of food in there to see if he’d eat them. They just sank to the bottom.

I rescue this fish from the cats and the first day I bring him home he’s gotta die on me?! I thought. I picked up his tank and swirled it around. The plastic was warm to the touch. He must have overheated sitting in the window. I rushed to the kitchen, opened, the fridge, removed the gallon of milk sitting at the front, and set Spalding on the shelf with the refrigerator door open in an attempt to cool him off quickly. Within a couple minutes, he began to swim again. I let out a sigh, grabbed the jug of milk and held it heavy against my stomach, letting the condensation dampen my shirt and cool me off.

I found a new spot for Spalding in the kitchen by the sink--away from direct sunlight. And that’s where he stayed every day, for weeks, and then months. I fed him every day, twice a day. It became part of my morning and nightly rituals. But the one thing I could never get myself to do for Spalding was change his water.

I tried to do it once during one of Spalding’s weekends with mom when I was still living with my roommates and ended up having to ask my friend to help me. I dreaded the idea of him flopping out while I was changing the tank water and having to pick up his floppy fishy body with my bare hands. For whatever reason, it absolutely repulsed me.

So I waited for Patrick to come over every time his water needed to be changed. Being 25 miles apart in LA meant that it sometimes took up to two hours to get to my place during rush hour traffic, just to come change Spalding’s water when it got unbearably murky (that’s how I know he really loves me). In five minutes, Patrick could scoop out Spalding and plop him in a bowl, empty the tank, scrub it down, fill it back up with fresh water, and plop Spalding back in. A small part of me was always embarrassed by how simple it looked. But Patrick never made me feel bad for not being able to do it.

I took care of Spalding for almost a year before my anxiety about his death got bad. I was doing well at work--I got a promotion, worked long hours, even on weekends, did everything I thought a good employee should be doing. I had a boyfriend whom I loved endlessly and who loved me the same, and I had friends whom I saw semi-regularly. I was supposed to feel accomplished and at somewhat peace with the world. But this was around the time when I started having nightmares about Spalding.

I had these vivid, surreal dreams, all somehow slightly different, but all having the same two elements: trying to save Spalding from dying but ending up killing him instead. I had one dream where he jumped out of his tank and started flopping around, but as I scrambled to try to pick him up, he grew to be gigantic, five times bigger than me, and I had to wrestle him to the ground, the whole front of me, including my face, pressed up against his giant slimy, scaly body. This particular dream ended in me having to grab a knife and kill Spalding before he suffocated me.

These dreams not only terrorized me in my sleep, but also when I was awake. They started creeping into conversations I had with people I hardly knew. I learned to control that when I would get strange looks in return. I thought I was going crazy, and the fact that I had to now hide these thoughts entirely made me feel even more crazy. What always made me feel better was talking to Patrick about it. He never made me feel crazy. He just told me to write about it.

I knew that Spalding was nearing the end of his life. He was lethargic and pale. He couldn’t catch his food flakes anymore before they hit the floor of the tank and disappeared underneath the plastic rocks. I knew it was a matter of time, but I didn’t know when death would come for him or how. I had never watched anything die before. I’d seen dead animals, but I’d never watched the process happen. I’d been to funerals, but I’d been lucky enough to never have to watch a person die. I knew that I would have to watch Spalding die. And these dreams made me question my role in his death--was it morally better to just stand idly by as his life slips away, or to somehow speed up the process, like how people usually put down their dogs or cats so that they don’t have to suffer anymore? The anxiety loop closed and started all over again when I reminded myself I was asking these questions about a fish and criticizing myself once again.

What I had imagined in my worst nightmares would be a dramatic and gruesome death for Spalding was, in reality, gradual and quiet. Though, it was really not any easier than how I imagined. I would be doing mundane tasks, like doing the dishes or making breakfast, and Spalding would be nearby on the counter, bloated and distended, floating upright, falling to the bottom slowly, and spastically swimming back up. Finally, after a day or so, he stopped swimming back up. I called Patrick.

I broke the news to him, and we talked about how even aside from the nightmares and the anxiety, we loved our orange dancing flame. But he was in Arizona at the time. He couldn’t come send off Spalding for me. So I did what a lot of women do when they get overwhelmed--I called my mom. She came, and in less than five minutes she scooped Spalding out, carried him over to the toilet, plopped him in the toilet bowl, we said a quiet prayer, and down he went. I looked over her shoulder at every moment. But even at the end, I couldn’t get myself to scoop him out of his tank and flush him down the toilet.

After Spalding died, the nightmares stopped. But I still think about Spalding and our complicated relationship. It’s been almost 8 months since he died. I now have two kittens who are my entire world, the best companions I could have asked for. They’ll grow with me, watch me get married and have kids, be by my side as I navigate my career, sit on my belly and purr as I write stories from my living room couch. And it pains me to think that one day I will no longer have them. But I can’t worry about that anymore. Instead I choose to worry about giving them enough belly kisses in a day, cleaning the crusties out of their eyes, squishing their toe beans, and giving them their nighttime treats. No matter how hard I try to search for a sense of control in my life, I may never get it. I’m not sure if anyone gets it. But there will be times when I can make choices. And next time, I choose to be the one who picks Spalding up and sends him on his way.