If a bird falls in love with a fish, where will they live?

A friend asked me this, out of the blue. It's an old proverb, and I answered it the way you answer a riddle:

A fishbowl, obviously. Though I suspect the bird's real problem is a partner visa, not how to breathe.

The horizon

She saw it differently. I'm telling this part in my own words, since hers were personal to her, but it goes something like this.

The bird and the fish meet where their worlds touch: the surface, the horizon, that thin seam where water becomes sky. It's a beautiful place. It is also only a meeting place, and a meeting place is not a home. Love, in this telling, is real but not load-bearing. It can't change what air is or what water is. Two creatures can adore each other completely and still belong to different worlds. When one of them gives up its element for the other, the sacrifice doesn't rescue the love. It dissolves the one who made it. What's left isn't two creatures living together; it's two creatures surviving each other.

There's no villain in the story. Nobody is selfish, nobody is cruel, nobody is wrong. The worlds are simply different, and the honest response is to recognise that rather than fight it. Some love stories stay with us because they were impossible. The impossibility isn't the tragedy. It's the reason we remember them.

It's an elegant perspective. It's also a closed one.

The fishbowl

The fishbowl is only half the picture. The other half is the bird diving: the bird underwater, burning its lungs for love; the fish ashore, living in a bowl. Same sacrifice, different element. The fishbowl isn't the glib answer after all. It's where the story gets harder.

Because now ask: does the fish love the bird more for having left the water? Or does the bird slowly fall out of love, because the fish it fell for was quick and alive in the sea, and the creature in the bowl is weak, confined, half itself? Is it even the same fish?

We watch milder versions of this play out constantly. Someone moves cities for a partner. Leaves friends, family, the water they were quick in. Sometimes it works. Sometimes they turn resentful, or simply become a different version of themselves, and the ugly questions surface. Is that still the person you fell in love with? Is it fair for that to be the reason it ends? Or has the sacrifice become a debt? Is the bird now obliged to look after the fish, precisely because the fish gave up the sea for it?

One version of the story ends before any of this, at the moment of recognition, both creatures nobly turning away. The other starts there. And it ends here:

Nobody is wrong. But hurt is inevitable. If they don't try, they hurt because they never know. If they do try, they hurt because they fail.

#philosophy