octavius the great

i bought a siamese fighting fish about a week ago. i decided to buy it for deep symbolic reasons,(and by that i mean i liked how pretty its colors are). it's cambodian-coloured, meaning it has a lighter body with really bright fins. the most interesting thing i found about them, is that in the wild, betta fish usually don't become bright colored unless they're mad. i'm kind of glad i don't turn fuschia when i get mad. oh, and they puff out their gills if they're flirting. i wasn't aware that fish flirted. is that even a scientific term? anyways, i couldn't decide what to name it. it was between shostakovich (one of my favorite composers) and octavius (i mostly just like the name, however he was the father of augustus). i picked octavius because it's more fighting-ish sounding, (another deeply symbolic move on my part).

lately, octavius seems really lonely. he just kind of sits around, or whatever fish do. at first i felt guilty about putting him in a vase in my room. what right did i have to do that? what if he was happier in that mason jar at the pet store? i decided feeling guilty about a pet fish was borderline ridiculous, considering there's no way to give him a better life. but back to the loneliness. there's no way to really solve the problem. siamese fighting fish will eventually kill another male betta if they're sharing a tank. so he would be killing the one thing that could bring him happiness. and then it made me sad, because in some ways, i'm just like that little fish swimming around in a vase in my room.


“There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”
-Ernest Hemingway