Catholic Guilt Guilt Guilt

I found my goldfish dead when I came home from school today. I'd had it for about three and a half years, and it's shubunkin friend committed suicide by leaping from the tank over a year ago.

I was a terrible owner. I didn't have a filter or anything, and I spent the last two years wishing the little buggers would just die because I was too lazy to clean them out as much as I should have.

Now, of course, after wishing it dead for so long, I feel profoundly guilty. (Perhaps not profoundly, actually.) It looked weird lying there on the newspaper after I fished it out with the net. I only knew it as a moving being beyond the prism of plastic and water.

RIP fish. I'm sad you're dead, but I'm not sad I don't have to look after you any more.

(The fish only had names as a pair, and I couldn't remember which was which when one died. They were called Fizz (or "Phys") and Imp, after Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Something Living (you know, the big shark). I was looking at them when I first got them, and was struck by how the fact of little perfect examples of life were much harder to comprehend than death. Take that, Hirst.)