“Oh, thanks.”

I try hard not to let out disappointment through my sigh as Caroline hands me the clear, water-filled baggie. It’s bulging and reflecting the only sliver of sun that shines in from the outside world.

“Totally! Heard it’s good luck!” she says, bubbly as ever. Each of those bubbles pop directly on my face as she speaks. Caroline motions to the other two girls by her side, Stefanie with an “F” and Tiffani with an “I”. The three are dressed from head to toe in our school colors, as three automatons of teenage sports and spirit. Red. White. And blue.

I can’t even look at them in the eye.

Stefanie whispers, “You’ll probably want to get a bowl or something for it.” She motions, palm down and limp, the way you would shoo a waiter who brings you the wrong dish. “Put him on that tray thingy maybe.” I’m not sure why she’s whispering, but she’s done it since the moment she arrived. It’s like she’s worried someone will notice she’s here or something.

“Ya. Maybe.” I say, holding the plastic, see-through baggie in the air at the level of my head. I peer suspiciously into it. The transparent water crowds the entire plastic space, the space where only sandwiches should live. Not fish. Every molecule of water is trying desperately to seep out, just as clear as the bag itself. This helps the goldfish locked inside to appear as if he’s suspended in the atmosphere directly in front of me. He’s both free and trapped at the very same time.

Me, too. I think.

The goldfish is unassuming and ordinary as he swims in tight circles around his plastic home. More orange than gold, his tiny scales catch the light as he flits and flutters through the handful of water it’s trapped in. Or lives in. Trapped and living all at the same time. His fins are delicate and thin as gauze shades that hold the sunshine out, and his gills move subtly in unison on both sides of his cheeks. And, although he seems unfazed by my rather large and intrusive face leaning in, I can’t help but feel sympathy for this tiny life in a bag.

It's then I see myself from the outside in. For the first time since the accident, possibly for the first time ever. The surrounding water and plastic wrapping distort my view, yet the frown I wear isn’t to be mistaken. The red, white, and blue comrades of mine disappear from the scene. I can only see me. Staring back.

The pale blue hospital gown could have swallowed me whole. It lay resting over top of me without even the slightest attempt to cross the ties in the back. I’m not going anywhere. Thick rounded glasses of which I’d never choose myself resting over my eyes. Yet I still see the sorrow in them. My mom had picked out those glasses since my other ones had been lost or shattered, no one could be certain. The accident had broken much more, I’m told.

Wavy locks held against their will and a black hair tie wrapped atop my head. My not-quite-blond-anymore coif still harbors crusting, dried blood and dirt. Yet it’s been months since that night.

My arms look like pale sticks extending out of the gown’s sleeves. Partly due to the picnic blanket-like features of the cotton hospital gown, but also due to the time I’d spent living in a bed. My muscles have atrophied and my scars are growing in. Those scars would be a forever reminder of the accident, as if I’d need another one.

“Well, guess we should get going!” Caroline exclaims with her carbonated words. “You really do look good! Can’t wait ‘til you get back to school.” Really look good. People always say that before they leave. All the reallys make me really know they are lying. People do it to my face all the time. Really. And then they leave. They take one for-granted step after another and walk right out the door.

“Ya, when do you think you’ll be back? I mean, to school and swimming? The team misses you!” That’s the first and only thing Tiffani says, yet I can’t help but wish she hadn’t. I’m certainly not missed. They didn’t even say hi to me a couple of weeks ago, and now they’re greeting me in my hospital room with a god-damned goldfish in a disposable bag. Before the accident, they didn’t even know my name.

They think I’m pathetic. I think I’m pathetic. Lying here, half-naked, hooked up to towering machines and endless tubes. That incessant beeping. I hear it in my dreams, too.  I close my eyes. I wish I could go back to before. Before, there was so much less to worry about. Before, I wasn’t afraid. Before, I didn’t know so much. In my dreams though, I can always go back.

“Um, thank you for coming to visit. Oh, and thanks again for the fish.” I finally say, not knowing if it’s been seconds or years. My words are stuck in my throat. They’re lodged in that place between swallow and voice. I push them out anyway because I know I have to. To be grateful for their unwanted attention. I was always taught to thank someone when they bring you a gift, even if it feels like the most horrible thing that they could have done to you.

As the three teammates shuffle out the door, I’m alone. The beeping continues, as part of my new identity. I tap my finger along to the appalling tune. The room is dim yet stark white. Bare walls, except for the few printed photos of familiar faces taped up to take my mind off of it all. I’m so sick of everything being so blatantly colorless. I’m also sick of those photo faces smiling back at me. They don’t understand me. Not anymore.

Sighing audibly, I turn my focus to the goldfish. He blinks in stillness at me. He sees me and he sees right through me.

A tube connects to a hole in my neck consenting me to breathe that night. I don’t dare look at it. That hole makes my skin ache and my stomach retch. But the goldfish looks right into it. The fresh red and shining skin growing around the wound, trying to heal itself around the plastic tubing. It itches and it stings. I don’t dare touch it. But that damn fish can’t take his eyes off of it.

I can’t take my eyes off of it.

That hole kept me alive, pushing oxygen through my body when I couldn’t do so on my own. It’s not needed anymore. My body’s ready to repair itself. How the brain lags behind.

The dissonance of the will to live versus the desire to live is all the goldfish can see. It’s all I can see. He flutters around, staring into me further. I remove the blanket from my legs.

In a waving picture of color and light, the image of my broken and battered legs overflows my view. The bubbles around my container freeze in time and space for me to take a moment to endure it. The mauve undertones and weeping skin with spackled scabs line my legs from thighs to toes. Bandages of oozing fluid, crying for the part that didn’t survive.

Without the visible reminders, I’d have no sense of it at all. I don’t remember that night. I don’t remember shattering the glass window. I don’t remember landing on the cold highway. I don’t remember saying I couldn’t move my legs. And, I certainly don’t remember dying either.

The paramedics said there was nothing left to do. My neck was twisted. I wasn’t breathing. With a lacerated arm, blood pulled around me. “She’s no hope”

Yet something in me wouldn’t let go.

“I suppose I should introduce myself . . .” Clearing my throat, I grab all the words necessary for a conversation with a goldfish. I continue, “You must already know though. But this isn’t my home, it’s a hospital. I live here for now. I live in this bed because my body is too broken to get up.” Allowing silence for the goldfish to respond, I look down at my blood-starved and mangled legs the way only a goldfish is brave enough to do. “I was in an accident. I can’t walk anymore and everyone’s really sad. But you’re just a dumb fish, so you don’t even care.” Blinking hard, I feel tears welling near the lashed rims of my eyelids. 

I want so badly to slam the bag and the fish flat down on my bed. I imagine the bag, and the water, and the fish exploding all over that starched, pressed sheet in slow motion. I like to create a slowed-down fantasy of all the things I knew I’d never actually do, especially now. Fueled by anger and the inability to explain any of it, I relish in these imagined rebellions. Screaming at my night nurse when she draws my blood at three o’clock in the morning. Shoving the strawberry Jell-O off my plate as it comes hidden in a ceramic cup with matching lid for the fourth time in a row. High-jumping ninja kicks to the abdomen of the physical therapist who asks me to try to move my foot just “one more time.”

Imagined water droplets splaying all over my gown, soaking through to my skin. Drops ruining and curling the photos on the wall. Smudging the nurse’s notes at the edge of the bed. The water soaks to my legs. Yet I wouldn’t be able to feel it.

Unfamiliar emotions come over and nearly strangle me to death every single second since that night. I go from angry to disgustingly despondent in a matter of moments and barely know how to hold it all. I pick up the baggie to my eye level once again.

 I see myself again. I see the sadness rounded near the blue of my irises. It hugs deep inside. But I see something else there too. There is a spark. It’s iridescent and displays every color of the whole of the world in one single speck. It’s nothing, but holds everything all at once. It holds dreams and passions. It holds memories and motivations. It even holds hope. And the hope around hope. But I don’t know that yet.

I stare deeply at the goldfish. Beyond the baggie. Beyond the water. He doesn’t deserve to be in there.

 “Are you scared too?”

 Plump and delicate, he dances around the water. His blanketing fins glide and guide behind and around him. And, although he appears unmoved, I know better.

I want to feel sorry for him. For me. For his life. For my life. For existence beyond what is expected. I’m now living a life that is outside of what most determine living. I’m stuck in a zipper-locked baggie of nothingness. It’s me surrounded by the void of my own self. The water is lifegiving, yet I’d surely be dead in days if left only to it. I need more from this world. I need more from this life.

The hospital’s been my home for months. Yet all I can claim are those few photos Scotch-taped to the adjacent wall, some dressed-up wilted flowers in the corner sunbathing, and a pile of stuffed animals surrounding my own wilting feet.

My mother brings stuffed animals from the gift shop downstairs almost habitually. I don’t think she knows what else to do. I recognize she does it because she loves me, but I loathe those animals and their stuffed fluff so much. What bothers me most is she places each animal strategically around my lifeless legs, a puppy-dog-and-teddy-bear-injury border. They taunt me and my paralysis. I spend desperate hours each day just trying to kick them away, but it doesn’t work.

I can’t walk.

I’ve known it for months, but being stuck in bed and away from most things living, it still doesn’t feel real. Nothing feels real. In the hospital, everyone has something wrong, some even worse off than me. It’s easy to lay in bed all day and forget that life exists beyond these walls.

Just like the goldfish.

“I’m so sorry.” I begin to cry. Holding my breath inward to keep my tears quiet. Not only am I half-naked, sprawled out in a bed that I can’t get out of, but now I’m crying while sharing an extremely thin privacy curtain with another hospital patient only a ruler’s length away from me.

I want to hold my breath forever. I don’t want to let out whatever’s left inside of me. That goldfish doesn’t deserve to be trapped in a plastic bag, and he certainly doesn’t deserve to be living in the hospital with a lonely, sobbing, broken girl. Accompanied endlessly by self-loathing and pity, I’m never alone. I’m dreadfully lonely. Yet now, oddly, this little fish wipes away the exposed flesh of loneliness surrounding me.

His view of me is a shattered plastic portrait of my own reality. I feel so connected to the fish and his unintended domesticated destiny. The only thing he can do is swim to the other side of his see-thru baggie to try to get away from catching the misery I must have. His container, no bigger than a grapefruit, would never be far enough away.

 “Hola, hola!” The privacy curtain burst sideways to uncover an always-welcomed visitor. Nurse Judy along with her sing-songy voice matches up in perfect unison with the multicolored scrubs and wild hair barrettes. She’s the physical embodiment of the mood she wants for you, and you expect to succumb to it every time. She smells of lemons and lavender and bounces as she walks. I’m no opponent for her rainbow rainforest scrubs or dancing baby chicks ensemble. Those are the very things that have saved me. Waking up just to wonder if she’d smell of apple pie today or where the sloths in stocking caps and matching barrettes. She’s a virtuoso. She’s saved me.

“You have a fish! What fun!” Nurse Judy looks right through that bag, the fish, my pity party, and straight into me. Without even drooping her smile in the slightest, she gestures, “I’ll find a bowl for this little guy. I’ll search for a really big one—you know, that’s how goldfish thrive. They’ll only grow to the size of their container. And I want this one to grow big and strong!” She whips around and leaves, lemon and chicks and lavender and all.

They’ll only grow to the size of their container. And there it is again. The distorted view of myself through the water and the plastic baggie. As the water sways, so does the heart-shaped scar, exposing itself from the side of my temple. Looking deep into my own eyes, that speck of light glows. I smile to myself who smiles back. There’s an uncanny way of looking deep into yourself, into the true you, when you feel at your absolute weakest. I’m cracking all to bits and the spaces in between are the only parts that matter.

Nurse Judy reemerges with the sideways swipe of the curtain, revealing my comatose neighbor, and carrying a tiny glass bowl in one hand, twirling her stethoscope in the other. “This was all I could find. He’ll have to be good in here,” she admits, smiling in a way that is so honest and loving it makes a smacking noise at the corners of her mouth in its finale. I watch it from the baggie. The smile, however sweet, tells me this fish deserves better.

But I pour the goldish in there anyway. Nurse Judy claps. I squint my eyes to look straight through the tiny bowl and fish swirling inside. He looks disappointedly content. I look on.

Beyond the sadness. Beyond the glass, beyond the water and bowl itself. I blink in transparent disbelief, as I’m truly seeing it for the very first time. Yet it’s been waiting patiently for me. Freshly painted metal, shining from that sole sliver of sun shining through the window. Sturdy and resilient. There in the corner rests an otherwise overlooked, brand-new wheelchair. A single strip of blue painter’s tape holding an index card in place with capital letters each spelling out my name.  

 I’ll never be a goldfish.

-Ryan Harbuck

Her award-winning debut memoir WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE A CHAIR set off sparks in Ryan’s belly and a yearning for change within disability representation in literature. With words in Huffington Post, Newsweek, Insider, Motherwell, and New Mobility Magazine, Ryan has shared her own life experiences as a wheelchair user caused by a spinal cord injury in her teens. Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, Ryan has been a teacher, coach, mentor, and mom, and she’s on a mission to change the perspective and the narrative within both children and adult literature, one word at a time.