'Waiting Wishing Wanting' by Serena Jayne

If wishes were fishes, I’d wish for your love with one fat goldfish, won by the perfect Ping-Pong ball bounce into a glass bowl, whose inhospitable environment seems to magically repel hollow celluloid spheres, after all, carnivals can’t be giving away fish to every grubby-handed rug rat with a shiny quarter, but for you I’ll crack open my piggybank and wager every coin I collected since I was a kid until I won a fish to wish on, and if wishes were fishes, I’d be more sorry about accidently crushing your roommate’s blue beta with a miniature sandcastle statue, I never should have tried to clean Alpha’s tank with a belly full of bourbon or used the key I’d covertly copied, I never should have startled your roommate when he came home from working the nightshift, I never should have screamed back when he shouted words like psycho and obsessed and pathetic, I never should have insisted you’d defend me when you didn’t even come home that night; in the harsh light of dawn I saw myself as you must see me, in the funhouse mirror that turns everyone into sideshow freaks, because I was never your maiden, never your queen, never your goddess, rather I was the last resort which didn’t seem so bad with your beer goggles firmly fastened, the faulty choice with longer lasting consequences than a mere hangover, so you regretted choosing me, a poor substitute for the person you really wanted, yet I was always there waiting, wishing, wanting you—only you, and if wishes were fishes and you had a plastic bag containing a gasping guppy, cycling though every molecule of oxygen in its teeny tiny ecosystem, you’d be too smart to waste your wish on someone like me.