Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

Maybe it was okay to have some outsized faith in yourself. Maybe plunging along in complete denial of your doomed chances was not the mark of a fool but—it felt sinful to think it—a victor?

Maybe such unruly persistence is beautiful. Maybe it is not mad, after all. Maybe it is the quiet work of believing in Good. Of believing in a warmth, which you know does not exist in the stars, to exist in the hearts of fellow humans. Maybe it is something like trust.

So what was he whispering to himself? As he swept up the shards of his life’s work, as he threw away the fishes he could not recognize, as he tucked his little son, Eric, into bed the next night, knowing that lightning and bacteria and tectonic shifts lay in wait—abundantly, eternally—what exactly was he saying to spur himself on, to avoid being crushed under the futility of it all?

My apartment in Charlottesville swelled with coffee cups. Each one started out warm and brimming with hope, a hope that I could find the words—for a story, a love letter, a mantra—that would lead me out of my mess. But by the end of each day, the coffee cup would be heavy with soot. So heavy I couldn’t lift it. The mugs began accumulating on my windowsills. By the time I finished my thesis, my apartment, a yellow-walled attic, had taken on the sunken smell of soil.

The way to live was, in every breath, to concede your insignificance, and make your meaning from there.

There is grandeur in this view of life.

I’d make sure each activity came with an alcoholic beverage, and another, and another. It felt great to feel warmth without warrant. I could rediscover my laughter, the springs that made my smile go. When I’d awake the next morning, the world would feel extra bleak, yes, my face extra puffy and unlovable, yes, but I’d just wait till evening, when I could try to make it all go sparkly again.

It is the will of man that shapes the fates.

Even he needed to believe it was true, so as not to be consumed by despair.

It’s a hard lot being a human, these psychologists explain. You walk around with the knowledge that the world is fundamentally uncaring, that no matter how hard you work there is no promise of success, that you are competing against billions, that you are vulnerable to the elements, and that everything you ever love will eventually be destroyed. A little lie can take the edge off, can help you keep charging forward into the gauntlet of life, where you sometimes, accidentally, prevail.

She brought up, of all people, Copernicus. She spoke about how hard it must have been for people in his day to look up at the stars and fathom that the stars were not the ones moving. But still, it mattered, to talk about it, to think about it, to do the mental scrunching that allowed oneself to slowly let go of the idea of the stars as a celestial ceiling that rotated over one’s head each night. Because, as she said: “When you give up the stars you get a universe.

When I give up the fish, I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope. I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss. Life, the flip side of death. Growth, of rot.