I cleaned out my biggest aquarium this week.
Morrie, my cichlid who has ruled that tank like a tiny moody king, has been resettled into new accommodations — alternate arrangements, as they say in polite company when really you mean I rearranged an entire ecosystem on a Saturday. The tank that held his whole world for so long is now empty. Quiet. And the stones from the bottom of it — river pebbles, sea glass chips, the odd little orange and amethyst pieces that always caught the light — are spread out drying, shinier than I’ve ever seen them.
I keep walking past them and stopping.
There’s something about how clean they are. How honestly, plainly themselves they look without the algae and the water distortion and the years of fish life softening their edges. Just stones. Just exactly what they are.
I think that’s why I had to photograph them. Because right now my life feels a little like those stones — pulled up out of the water all at once, every color showing.
The house.
In July, my partner and I are moving into our first home. Ours. Not a landlord’s, not a temporary stop, not a place we are quietly hoping the roof holds out one more season. After almost seven years in this rented house — this beautiful, frustrating, deeply tired money pit — we are finally walking away from it. For good.
I haven’t told most of the internet yet. Only the closest circle knows. I’m saving the standing-in-front-of-the-house-holding-keys post for the day we actually shut the door of this rental behind us and never look back. There’s a superstition in it, maybe, or maybe just a need to feel the leaving before I let anyone else celebrate it with me.
But it’s real. It’s happening. We bought a house.
The truck.
In a little over two weeks I’m flying to Louisiana with my son to bring home a truck my father has given me. His beloved truck. The one he is no longer able to drive because of his age and his condition, and the one he wanted me to have rather than see it go to anyone else.
I haven’t owned a vehicle in years — by choice, mostly, because driving has always made me a little anxious. So this is layered. I’m excited. I’m nervous. I’m grateful in a way that feels almost too big to hold. And underneath all of that, the part I am trying very hard not to look at directly: this may be one of the last visits I get with my dad.
Every mile I drive that truck back to Florida is going to feel like him in the passenger seat. I already know it.
The stones.
And then, in the middle of all of this — the packing, the planning, the plane tickets, the new keys, the old keys, the goodbyes I am rehearsing in my head — I clean an aquarium. And the rocks come up shiny and bright and very, very real.
Maybe that’s why my brain locked onto them so hard. Because everything else right now is big and emotional and a little blurry around the edges, and these stones are here. They are solid. They are small enough to hold. They are proof that something I tended for years can be lifted out, rinsed off, and carried into the next chapter still beautiful.
A house we own. A truck from my dad. A fish in a new tank. A pile of clean little stones drying on a towel.
So many blessings. So many goodbyes folded inside them.
I don’t have a tidy ending for this one. I think I just needed to write it down before the next big thing happened and I forgot how the stones looked in this light.
— Cami
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