My favorite fish, Mollu, died today. I don’t know how, or why. Today at around 10:30 AM, when I got up to feed my fishes as I do every morning, I noticed that two of my orange mollies were eating the food, but not the eldest one. You, were nowhere to be found.
First I thought, maybe you are swimming at the bottom and haven’t realised that breakfast has been served. But 20-30 seconds passed and you still weren’t coming back to the surface to eat. Did you not realise? Who sleeps this late, and after I have scattered the good food? Not you!
You are usually the first fish to come and inhale all the food before others even get a chance. So as a concerned parent, I started sifting through the aquatic plants, trying to find you. Like finding Nemo, but way easier. In a few seconds after that, I wished I hadn’t looked for you so fast. Under the dense leaf of an Amazon frogbit, you lay stuck, right below the surface, the delicious food floating just one layer above you which you so loved. You weren’t moving. You weren’t breathing. It might have happened in your sleep, or did you have too much to eat?
When I fed the fishes yesterday in the evening, I had no idea that I would be feeding my Mollu for the very last time. My heart sank. I hastily found an orange container and “fished” you out. Tried fish CPR. Nothing helped. Your belly was swollen from all the food you are known to steal, like it’s you against your fishy friends, and that you are never going to see food ever in your life again.
Our days never started with greeting a fellow human “good morning”, “how did you sleep, well?“. Well, sometimes. It mostly started with us waking up, walking like slow zombies who would eat anything or anyone if they didn’t get their hazelnut or vanilla coffee, not brushing, washing our face, making breakfast, drinking water. We’d grab the fish food container in our sleep, tread down the mossy stairs with ease, and make a little jump from the second last stair towards our left as a shortcut to the aquatic mini pond in our lawn. Our fish are starving, it’s been more than 18 hours. There the first face we’d greet, yours, rose to the occasion, like literally, and we would pucker our faces down to meet yours, almost touching the water surface, and blowing our morning breath into yours, yelling into your little fishy ears, very singsongy, “Hello Mollu!“.
If I sprinkled food thinly on to the surface, the first fish to come up to the surface was always you, Mollu. It was the race in life which you’d always win, without fail, every single day. Your appetite for food, any kind of food was insane. A real foodie as we call it. Not a picky eater at all. Even the water cabbage roots and guppy grass ends were sucked clean by you, lest some of the fish food stuck to them. We would laugh at your antics and yell, “Those bits are for the kids, please leave some food for them!” You brought joy to our life, the apple of our eyes. Your monstrous dumb face doing the aggressive num-num-num. Sometimes we would trick you by pretending to sprinkle food, and at times you would fall for it in the beginning. Later you learnt, and we were like, “Wow smartass, you want real food now, don’t you?“. We affectionately called you Bukhhad Mollu, Motu Mollu, Mollu Raja, Prisoner Mollu, Hangry Mollu, Asshole Mollu, Horny Mollu, Big Mollu.
The Prisoner Mollu persona emerged from a long story. Back when you were in your teens or youth, you would chase every female fish you would find. You were ready to mate, more than the females. But all your wives bore children, and when it was time to deliver the kids, they dropped dead. Livebearers have it hard. It was heartwrenching, as they all lay dead, and you were a widower 7 times, until even the males died, and it was just you in the Molly species. For you, it must have felt like the end of the world. Because the mini pond was your entire world. You didn’t know that they were others like him in the world somewhere. In the pond, your life started, and that’s the same place it ended. To you, the pond was your entire world.
If I had a time machine, I would try to do things right, even though I don’t know what that would be. If that meant living my life a hundred times over, but getting to try different things to extend your lifespan, I would in a heartbeat. Yours is the second death I witnessed, which has messed me up so much, and grieve I shall.
In my heart, I wished that I would sprinkle a pinch of shrimp fish food, pellets, or bloodworms, and you’d come right back to life to devour them. But you didn’t. I hope you died happy, eating to your heart’s fullest, surrounded by your amazing friends, with enough oxygen to spare for your fun antics. You didn’t get to have children. Maybe you didn’t care. You just cared about chasing heavily pregnant platies, other mollies, and mostly, tried nipping the fins of everyone who looked pretty. You, little shit, had a serious ritual of flirting too. You would shake your entire body in a sudden frenzy, pretend to bump into another fish, then start eating right beside her, sometimes diving deep into the water and coming right up beside. As you grew fatter and older and lonelier, we got you six other mollies, two male and the other four female. To our amazement, you immediately made friends.
You were a workaholic in your own way. You didn’t like how we humans had haphazardly put the guppy grass, hornwort, water cabbages, Amazon frogbits, peace lilies, anubias, pothos and salvinia into the aquatic pond by chucking them into the water and just letting them grow. So you took time out of your terribly busy day, to rearrange every plant. Yes, each one of them. And very meticulously, too. By the time you were done, all the water cabbages were sticking to one another, and every frogbit was spaced out. You would do this lazily though. Now one might ask, “How did he rearrange every plant on the surface with minimal movements? He doesn’t have hands!”
Well, you applied whatever fish physics knowledge you had acquired during the entirety of your fish life to the test. You would flap your fins enough to keep yourself afloat, and suck the water near the plant you wanted closer. The plant you hated? Well, you would go to the opposite side of that plant, and start sucking as much water as you could, and we’d watch the nasty plant move away to the beat of your heart and as a slave to your whims.
You were our little baby, and whatever you wanted, you had. More friends? Check. More plants? Check. A biological filter you could poop on? Check. Bloodworms? Check. I would have killed anyone who bothered you, even if you never asked me to - because you couldn’t.
Today was probably the first day that I didn’t care about how many likes my posts got, how many followers I gained or lost, didn’t check if I got any leads from my outreach or ads, and headed straight back to bed, tears welling up inside my cheek. At one point, my well developed a crack, the cracks multiplied, and I burst into tears and cried a river wanting to be set free into the vast ocean. I broke the news to my partner after some visible hesitation, “Mollu died”. And resumed my wailing. He pulled me closer and hugged me longer than he usually does. He’s not a big hugger, but today was different. His face changed shape and became smaller. If he could, he would have cried, but he held himself together to calm me.
We had lost our son, and we couldn’t replace you with another one from the store. If one of the fishes brought you to his sudden demise, we wanted justice. We wanted to know exactly what went wrong, demanded. We would dedicate a song to you, our Mollu, hold an open casket and invite no one else to it, bury you with some of the food you loved so dearly, no matter how wasteful it looked to a bystander; bloodworms, powdered shrimp. We had turned into the parents we never thought we would be. Nothing had hurt us so much before. One more reason we found, not to get too attached to places, things, and of all things, life. Loving life so much, and hating death worse. If the Grim Reaper existed, seeing our plight, they would have regretted taking this one, you.
I’m not religious, and that’s a bummer for today. Because if I was, I would have had peace knowing that my Mollu would eventually reincarnate, and come back to life in some form or the other, somehow keeping your personality intact in no matter which species you sought into. Grabbing food off other fishes’ mouth, doing a very audible num-num-num with your silly face, and rolling your eyes if we wanted a kiss. You were so alive.
Mollu, you were a survivor, come what may.
Too much ammonia in the water? Poop floating around? All of your wives died the same day? Too much sunlight? It rained, and the water level rose enough for you to jump and belly flop onto the floor?
I had a mini heart attack, you didn’t. Thought I’d lost you. Found you, grabbed you and put you right back into the water, you instantly thrived. Although you were quiet for a few days following your near death experience, and gave up on jumping altogether.
Every single time, even when it was too much for others, you managed to live, through all the atrocities of nature, the nosey snail births, the punishments in the prison container in the pond with holes for water to isolate you from the pregnant smelly fishes until you fixed your behavior.
I guess eating was your coping mechanism to survive it all. If I gave you a bite of instant noodles, you might have swallowed it whole too. Haha.
But today, you died, when conditions were most favorable. I am starting to think that you hated your comfort zone and finally left. We will miss you like hell on Earth. We will miss you mistaking our fat fingers for food and sucking them until you realise your gluttonous mistake and retreat to your underwater house in pure embarrassment. We loved your flaws, as much as we loved your kindness and friendliness. When we got you siblings, you were so quick to share your food and not bother them, even though you were full of greed from fin to tail. Your 180 degrees of change in demeanour shocked and amazed us, the things you would do out of love, like waiting for your siblings to eat a bite for 10 seconds, before you inhale everything that remained.
Today, I measured you after you died, trying my last hand at knnowing what might have gone wrong with you. You were 6 centimetres long, and 2 centimetres fat. You weighed just 4 grams. And as every hour passed, your belly kept getting softer, and at least one of your bright orange scales dropped from your body into the water that surrounds you now, until you were finally buried with your favorite fish food, bloodworms, pellets, pebbles, frogbits, water cabbage babies, while your hearthstone on the lawn under the solar light where we put you says,
“In loving memory Mollu the Fish
An annoying son to his parents, a big-mouthed vacuum cleaner to his bloodworms, a passionate chaser in his youth to apple snails and pregnant platies, a kind sibling to many, one-time prisoner of his own actions (#1 fin nipper and chaser in the entire pond), OCD cleaner of his tank and meticulous organiser of hundreds of plants, near death experiencer and jumping champion (very exclusive events), great husband to many wives, and a very happy glutton till his last breath”
In the saddest handwriting possible, laminated against the elements, and imprinted with endless kisses.
Coincidentally enough, a song by Dagny is playing in the room as I write this. I am hereby dedicating this song to the greatest fish I had the chance to know in my lifetime.
[Pre-Chorus]
Things I knew just don’t seem the same
Baby you’re the one that I blame
Look what you, look what you’ve gone and done
[Chorus]
Own up
Tell me you’ll always show up
You know it’s all your fault that
I hate being alone
I hate being alone now
Own up
Tell me you’ll always show up
Used to be fine before ya
Now I hate being alone
I hate being alone
Now
[Verse 2]
Grey days
Nothing could save ‘еm
Nowadays I celebrate ‘еm
Sleepless
But who needs to sleep when
Your hands are keeping me dreamin’
[Pre-Chorus]
Things I knew just don’t seem the same
Lose my head all over the place
Look what you
Look what you’ve gone and done
No
I am not a drinker. But I’ll chug some of the most bitter butterfly pea tea in your honour, offer valid only for today, as you sulk, lying motionless in the smallest pond, an orange container, just like your scales. You were the fish I would have never cooked no matter how annoying you were, even though I threatened that sentence a lot in good conscience. Your friends and family will have some diluted methylene blue in your honour, and happy that now they have a little more room to breathe, and lots of extra food now that you are gone. Cheers.
Just to make sure you were indeed a male fish, and not a female fish who accidentally missed out on having a gravid spot with kids inside, I had to cut you open with a blade, and see that you just have intestines. The hardest incision I ever had to make. Now I understand why doctors aren’t allowed to operate on someone familiar like their friend or worse, family. And you? You were family. While budgeting, I would never put your expenses under “Fish expenses” or something vague like “Pet supplies”. I would put it under “Food”. I would put it under “Family expenses” if they were your accessories, or simply “medicines”.
It was so hard to smell your blood all over my hands, and the sheer fact that I had to bury you while my partner dug the hole in the ground while you were in my palms. I left some food and gifts with you, just in case. Call me crazy. I guess I am. Crazy to realise, that you are gone. Now I never want to get another pet aka family member, ever, ever again. But deep down in my heart, I know that I am lying, and will be back to try on new family, hoping they will be at least half as smart and curious which you were.
You will be missed till the day I live. Now off you swim away before my hands find and torment you, my favorite one. Yes, you were. It’s so hard to bury you and leave you alone, cold, dead in the ground. I shall go now, my little one, and wipe my tears, till they erupt again, trying to rinse myself off your memories, and eat my mi goreng, because I am very, very hungry.
Love, Ritz