My partner and I absolutely love animals, so we’ve brought more than our fair share of living creatures into our house over the past year and a half! We’ve filled our small home with dogs, two rats (read about our Michael and Quentin parent journey in this post—can you believe I love them even more now than before?), a stray cat (I love Bacon so much it hurts!! Read about how we adopted her through foster failure in this post!), a handful of found and/or injured birds, fish, snails, shrimps, and guppies along with dozens of aquatic and ground plants. At this point in our relationship, I’m entirely unsurprised when my partner shares new pets we’ll adopt and/or foster animals we’ll have to take in for short stints. Thankfully, my partner is the one who does basically all of the pet and pet house feeding and cleaning, respectively (I’m the deadbeat in this relationship), so I get to enjoy the new tiny friends through playing and endless kisses and cuddles! While I am over the moon in love with my furry creature pets, I also quickly grew to adore our betta fish I lovingly named Bubble. My partner bought Bubble from a pet store on October 20, and I am heartbroken that he suddenly passed away this past Monday exactly four months later. Bubble lived in a tank with my four snail babies Pippin, Poopin, Poppin, and Puppin (can you tell I’m a creative namer here?) right next to my home office desk and he was the friendliest fish I’ve ever known or had. Every morning when I’d come in our office, he’d wake up from his leaf bed and swim around in loops while I gave him kisses through the glass. He liked to play hide and seek and swim around looking for my face when I’d hide behind the tank plants. Bubble loved eating his shrimp flakes and he’d ecstatically burst from one part of the tank to the other when he knew it was feeding time, but there was nothing he loved eating more than mosquito larvae (which he ate quite often). At night I would feed him his dinner and tell him how much I loved him before he settled down in his leaf bed and I went to sleep. We’re not 100% sure what ultimately killed Bubble, but are almost certain something was wrong with his swim bladder. Bubble’s life started ending extremely late on Sunday night and we moved him to a smaller tank with less water so he could easily reach the surface for air. I luckily got to tell Bubble how much I loved him and placed a post it note with my last loving messages right next to his tank so he could see it. My partner and I bought a beautiful plant to bury his sweet body in and I’ll have the plant as my new office mate in memory of my dear fish pet.
