Erin’s desk was tucked away in the farthest corner of the open-plan office, like a forgotten island. Her desk was piled high with papers, coffee cups, and an old, humming computer—but it lacked a certain “vibrancy.” That was until one Monday morning, when she felt a cold object deep inside her drawer—it was a resin-encased koi fish made of crystal shards.
It was no bigger than a thumb, completely transparent, and contained fine golden glitter and a few irregularly shaped colored stones. Sunlight streaming through the blinds hit it, refracting a nearly liquid-like sheen. Erin couldn’t remember when she’d bought it—perhaps an impulse purchase after an emotional breakdown, or maybe a memento left behind by a colleague who’d long since left the company. She casually placed it next to her keyboard, directly facing the never-ending reports on her monitor.
The days passed as usual amid the clatter of her keyboard. Erin’s life was sliced into countless fifteen-minute fragments: replying to emails, revising proposals, and fielding her boss’s last-minute questions. She felt like a fish flung onto the shore, each breath a searing burn. The koi lay quietly in the corner of the desk, occasionally catching a faint glimmer under the fluorescent lights, like a silent observer.
The turning point came late one night while she was working overtime. Erin was the only one left in the office. The air conditioning was set to a freezing temperature, so she wrapped her coat tightly around herself and stared at the dense array of data on the screen, when suddenly she felt an intense sense of suffocation. That sensation didn’t come from the air, but from some kind of invisible, crushing weight. She instinctively reached out, her fingertips brushing against the koi.
The surface of the resin was warm and smooth as jade, nothing like the coldness of plastic or resin. In that instant, Erin was overcome by an illusion: what lay in the palm of her hand wasn’t a lifeless object, but a pool of solidified water. The golden flecks sealed inside seemed to be slowly swimming. She stared at the fish for a long time—so long that her eyes began to ache. She noticed that the fish wasn’t completely still; its tail was slightly curled upward, forming an arc as if it were gathering strength, as if it were about to break through this transparent confinement and swim into the air at any moment.
“Do you feel cramped in here, too?” she asked softly.
No one answered; only the hum of the computer case’s cooling fan could be heard. Yet, for some reason, Eileen’s heartbeat slowed. As she watched the fish, she suddenly realized a strange truth: although the fish was trapped inside a tiny block of resin, every scale and every hue on its body appeared so relaxed and at ease. It hadn’t become distorted by its confinement; instead, it had transformed that confinement into its own radiance.
In that moment, Erin didn’t discover any secrets to career advancement, nor did she suddenly figure out how to solve that tricky project. She simply set it gently back on the desk, adjusting its angle so that the moonlight streaming in through the window would fall precisely upon it.
The next morning, when the first rays of sunlight once again struck the desk, Erin noticed that the koi’s position seemed to have shifted. Of course, her rational mind told her it was either an unconscious touch from the night before or a visual illusion caused by the refraction of light. But as she gazed at the little fish shimmering in the morning light, that burning, suffocating sensation in her heart vanished.
She felt as though she had come to understand something: perhaps life is a vast, transparent tank in which we all swim. But what determines whether we suffocate is not the size of the tank, but whether we still remember that we are, at our core, made of water. As long as that vast ocean remains in our hearts, even in the confines of a small space, we can still have the freedom to sway our tails.
Erin picked up her coffee, took a sip, and began tackling the first email of the day. She moved just as busily as ever, but her eyes now held a quiet, luminous glow—much like that of the koi.
