The glass wall between me and them, or maybe between me and everything, is thin, barely perceptible, but insurmountable like the flow of time. I sit in a shabby waiting room chair, the leather of which is cracked like hardened earth, and I watch their silent, water-filled life. A slow, choreographed dance without sound, only bubbles rising up like unfulfilled prayers. The shirt collar, which seems to have shrunk an inch overnight, tightens around my neck, a tiny, insistent reminder of my own body's limits.

One, the largest, with a torn tail fin, freezes in the middle of the road, as if remembering a long-forgotten, pleasant event. Her scales are parade armour, polished like a mirror, and something else glimmers in them for a moment. A distant, lost summer sun. All it took was muddy water and one fish with a torn fin to return to a place I swore I would never return to. To that moment on the old wooden bridge, where she laughed, and her laughter hung in the air like this fragrant fresh water.

The aquarium expands. It becomes that lake, its murky bottom the muddy shore of our swimming. Smaller fish, dragging their shadows like worn coats, turn into the blurred silhouettes of that evening - the wave of someone's hand, someone's lost scarf. Everything there, in that glass cube, moves according to the rhythm of the times. Slowly. The most important things happen slowly. And the artificial, pale moonlight filtering through the lid is the same that fell on her wet hair then.

I look at the big fish, at its scarred fin. The scar. So there was something. Something sharp, real. She moves slowly again, continuing her silent ceremony as if nothing has happened, as if the memory is a brief pause for inspiration. And I remain sitting here.

Is memory just such an aquarium? An enclosed space where once-in-a-lifetime moments float in circles, slowly fading until only their shadows remain, until you can no longer distinguish what was real and what was just the play of light on old, mirrored armor?