You slip between my fingers, crumbling to dust on the way down. Your teeth sink into the wedding ring you paid too much for. Unkempt hair gets caught up in the air like how Christians imagine they’ll float up during the rapture.

You were fourteen years my senior, the one thing about us that never changed. We met at the Borders in my college town no more than a month before it closed forever. The building was bought by a televangelist and is now a megachurch. I hear you can make more money off salvation than books nowadays.

We spent the day we met wandering the bookstore, conversing about our favorite authors. During a tangent sandwiched between discussions about Chabon and Hosseini, you asked me out for drinks.

I said yes, entranced. I said yes, to keep you from dissolving the moment our bookstore adventure ended, never to see me again and existing only in my memory. I said yes, not knowing I’d keep you around forever.

“Why so coy?” you asked on our first date.

I had just turned twenty-one; I couldn’t order a drink to save my life. A shrug and a laugh from me propelled you to smile, touch my wrist, tangle your fingers into my bracelets.

Our conversation then switched to proofs, fermentation, and hops. You were a gin guy, both when it came to alcohol and playing cards. Not a gambler, but a wanderer. We moved to a different state almost every year; not because we had to, but because you wanted to. Iowa was your favorite for whatever reason. We lived there for four years, longer than you had lived anywhere else. Ever since we uprooted to upstate New York, you mused about going back. You never did.

For once I have you in the palm of my hand, and yet still you float away from me. Dissolving, shedding. Even in death, you still wander.

I remember the Iowa house fondly. The previous owners left us our first koi pond, which we uprooted and precariously took with us to New York.

The college town oasis surrounded by cornfields made for a moderately successful piano lesson business for me. One of my students, Michael, spent what seemed like to me the majority of his high school tenure perched in the piano room off the foyer.

“I only have a keyboard at home,” he said. “I want to practice on your upright.”

I allowed, only kicking him to the living room or backyard when it was time for another student’s lesson. This extended to Michael doing his homework on the couch on days when he didn’t have a lesson. If you were working late, Michael would stay for dinner. I’d order Hawaiian pizza or oyster pails of chow mein and egg rolls. We’d usually have the TV on satellite channels. During commercial breaks, Michael would beg me to play him theme songs of TV shows older than his parents. “Play Cheers! Play M*A*S*H! Play All in the Family!” At his following lesson, I’d have him play them as warmups.

When nothing was on TV, I’d throw on a movie.

“Let’s watch an old movie,” he’d request. “Like Moulin Rouge!”

I’d roll my eyes, refusing to acknowledge that to him I was ancient.

He fell asleep once while we were watching Jacob’s Ladder. I nudged with the shoulder his face rested on. He raised his head, eyes no more than a slit.

“Don’t you want to see how it ends?” I asked. “If he’s alive or not?”

His head bobbed. A labored attempted to keep his eyes open failed.

“I can take you home if you’re too tired to drive,” I said.

“Okay.”

I drove in silence; the radio wasn’t even on. He lulled against the passenger side window, eyes waxing and waning cyclically.

During the last few yards of the car ride, I tried to spark minimal conversation. Something small, trivial even.

“They used to put CD players in cars, ya’know,” I said. “And cigarette lighters.”

“Umm hmm.”

Riveting. Fucking riveting. I’m sure if you and I had children, I’d have lulled them to sleep with stories of fax machines and dial up.

I kneel at the edge of the pond. The fish swim to the perimeter; they can’t get enough.

You fall like manna from heaven.

I called Michael’s mother once to inquire about the possibility of him being depressed.

“We have him on escitalopram,” she answered. “Why? Has he said something?”

“No,” I said over a tender rendition of “Sister Golden Hair” from the next room. “It just seems like he comes here right school and doesn’t leave until I tell him to.”

“Oh, I can tell him tonight that bothers you and your husband and that he should only go over for his piano lesson.”

“No, no, it doesn’t bother me at all.” I peered into the room at Michael.

Tawny curls hooked his wire glasses frames as they slid down his nose. A cross necklace danced above middle C. God, he had terrible posture. His carmine lips were always chapped, no matter how much ice water or lemonade I offered him while he was over.

A G-minor got promptly corrected to a G#-minor. He sang like he didn’t know the words even though he suggested the song.

“It just seems to me that he’s not…socializing like he should be at his age.” I don’t know why I said it that way. I knew full well that I too was like that at his age.

“I see,” his mother said.

“I’m just a little worried about him. Just thought you should know.”

She thanked me and hung up.

I returned to the bench and watched Michael’s face. Focused and near motionless, lips mumbling the chorus.

When you and I first met, you told me you played piano for a time but never kept up the hobby. I offered to teach you, but we never got around to it.

Hellbent on leaving Ames, Michael asked me to write him letters of recommendation to East Coast colleges. I obliged; spirits lifted by the fact that for once I wasn’t the one leaving town.

Now, I’m looking at you. Nothing but a mound of grey powder. Forever trapped in a koi pond in upstate New York. You’d hate it if you knew where you are.

One day last April, I saw Michael out the back window, soaking his feet in the koi pond.

“What’s wrong?” I took off my sandals and added my feet to the pond.

“I got into Princeton,” he said. “And Cornell.”

“That’s awesome! Which one are you going to?”

“I don’t know.” Two of the fish circled his ankles. “What are their names?”

“Oh, James and I didn’t name them,” I said. “Do you want to?”

He lifted his right foot until his big toe breached the surface of the water. “Do you have anything to feed them?”

I got up and retrieved the bag of pellets from the garage. I poured a mound into his hand.

Michael pointed at the two fish circling his ankles. “White one is Cornell; orange one is Princeton.”

He tossed a single pellet into the pond, and Orange was quick to break its path to snatch it.

“Princeton it is,” I said.

Michael smiled.

“Right choice?” I pinched some pellets from his palm and sprinkled them into the pond. A similar motion guides my hand now.

“I was kind of hoping Princeton would be the one to bite, yeah.” He dangles his fingertips into the water.

“What are you going to study?”

“Linguistics.”

“Magical.”

“What did you study?”

“Creative writing.” I dusted another pinch of pellets into the pond. “For my thesis, I wrote a novel set at Woodstock.”

His fingers swayed in the water.

“You can pet them,” I said. “They’re friendly.”

He caressed Cornell’s scaly back. “Feels weird.”

“A lot of things do.”

He withdrew his fingers and used them to scratch his upper lip. He mimicked the fish opening and closing their mouths. When he couldn’t keep himself composed anymore, he giggled. He submerged his feet deeper into the water until the water licked the hem of his shorts. His eyes followed Princeton circling the pond and occasionally coming up to kiss the surface. His feet swayed and swashed the water into micro-whirlpools.

“Do you love James?” Michael asked.

I scoffed. “I married him.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

I leaned back into the grass. “Don’t therapize me, Michael. This is adult stuff you wouldn’t understand.”

He joined me, lying on his side, chin pressed to his palm. “I could try. Tell me about him.”

I exhaled sharply. “Michael…”

His eyes shone through the fingerprint-ridden lenses of his glasses.

“Did you quit taking your antidepressants?”

He rolled over onto his back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I didn’t like them.”

“Michael, I’m not your doctor, I’m not your mom, but I think you’re depressed. Switch medications, talk therapy… Do something other than spending every waking moment at your piano teacher’s house.”

Michael shot up and curled his head down into his hands. I lifted my feet from the pond and stood.

“If you don’t want me here, I can leave,” he mumbled.

“No, Michael, no.” I set my hand on his shoulder. “James will be home soon; you can join us for dinner. I have enchiladas in the oven I need to take out soon.”

He stood up and shook what water he could off his feet. “I’ll pass. But thank you.”

A breeze blows particles into the grass. I sit cross-legged at the edge of the pond, the cold, jagged rocks pressing into my shins. I take another handful of you.

After his final lesson before he left for Princeton, Michael kissed me. A gross, inexperienced, squalid kind of kiss. He even wiped his hand across his lips afterward. I shoved him square in the chest, causing him to step back.

“Go home, Michael,” I said.

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Go home. Michael.”

He hung his head and retreated to his pickup truck. I stayed on the porch until he turned the corner off our street.

I turned around to you in the doorway.

“What the hell was that?”

“A hormonal eighteen-year-old boy.”

I went to step inside. You stepped in my way.

“He’s depressed, James.” I pushed past you into the house and sat on the piano bench.

“Sure.” You slammed and locked the front door and sat beside me on the bench. You said my name, awaiting more of an explanation.

“Leaving home is probably really stressful for him,” I said. “He’s spent a lot of time here.”

“I’ve noticed.” You looked over at me. I didn’t flinch.

You kissed me. Set your head on my shoulder. “Play me something?”

I played “Vienna,” I think it was. Something Billy Joel that wasn’t “James.” You always hated that song. I was never quite sure why; maybe an ex-girlfriend played it for you one too many times or something. I start singing it to you now that you’re nothing but dust in the water being drunk by koi fish. What the hell are you going to do about it?

I think of Michael often, wondering if his unrequited crush was transplanted onto a college town coffeeshop coworker or perhaps an English professor. I dream sometimes about running into him in a Staten Island bookstore swapping stories about the books we had open on our thighs in College Algebra. He always says Vonnegut, even though I don’t recall a single conversation he and I ever had about his novels.

Or a dream set in a bar in Philadelphia, where he’s always with the band. I tell him how Jacob’s Ladder ends, and he cries. I still can’t order drinks, and Michael asks me that cataclysmic question, “Why so coy?”

You stick to my fingers. I blow like you’re a mature dandelion. You disperse in a puff of grey powder and trickles down to the water and its fence of jagged rocks. I submerge my hand after the last of you. The water is aptly cold yet comfortable.

If I toss it in the pond, can the koi fish eat the urn, too?

– Claire Rosemary