Looking at pictures of your ex
on Facebook at three o’clock
in the morning never helped anyone
my mother says with her bittersweet
chocolate voice flowing
through the phone.

But she can’t remember
the time when he took me to the fair
and won me a sickly carnival fish
swimming in circles, banging
its head on the glass
of a too-small fishbowl
filled with icy blue water.
We named him Bear
so he would grow
big and strong
fed him all the love
we could muster up.

The best we could give
was an old plastic cup
much too small for love
to grow the way it needs to.
I looked into the fish’s blank eyes
and saw a piece of me
I had not seen before
and in the morning
there he was belly-up,
eyes blank as before.

He said sometimes
that's just what happens
when you love someone
too much.
He was right.