Of fish and friends

So...about the fish.
We adopted three goldfish last year, from which one was actually white. She seemed like she was dying from the moment we got her. She would start floating around, faze out and such but if you tapped the aquarium window she would start swimming like nothing happened. But for the last week or so she kept getting worse and yesterday morning she finally died.

But she is still in the aquarium. A floating, bloated, dead fish. I am petrified of dead things, especially ones I cared about. Dead animals. Dead people. And, maybe most of all, dead friendships.

I am a facebook kind of a person. I don't use the Instagram, Twitter, Vine or all of those other trendy social media networks. I don't blog. I don't vlog. I, like any other newly baked mother, prefer Facebook. Mommy groups. Breastfeeding pages. Woven wrap giveaways. Trough the mommy groups, and with a few old real life friendships turned momships, I have my build my online village which is made of my mommy friends. We share experiences, useful articles and funny, relatable memes of mom stuff. We share our journey of plugged milk ducts, cloth diapers and strong willed children.
That village of ours, like any other, suffers (or benefits, depending on your point of view) from migration. Women come, women go. Points of view change and we just grow apart of each other.
Friendships die.
I take my Facebook page quite personally. I am wary of whom I let in and what content I share with a certain group. My mom friends are all on my ''friends'' list while my other friends, most real life childless friends, relatives and alike are on my ''aquatince'' list. I share my kid's adventures, my opinions and passions I have for certain feminist, motherhood, birth activism or lactivism topics with them. I share my favorite gentle parenting articles, my excessive love for Mike Patton and my Harry Potter obsession with them. I share my frustrations with the medical system, lame choice of little girls clothes, politics and local celebrity feuds. All the stuff most of my real life friends consider stupid, boring and/or insignificant but I find very important and worthy of discussion.
So I and my mom friends engage in some very heated discussions and I tend to learn a lot from them. I have many times changed my point of view when they presented me with good arguments and facts I have not yet heard of. We call, we send each other presents for kids birthdays. Christmas cards. We worry when one gets sick. We know each others due dates. Some of us even met in real life, or if we live close enough we keep on seeing each other.
So when my mommy friendship dies it feels like a punch in the stomach. It feels worse than high school breakup. It takes months for me to be at peace with what happened.
I switch them to the 'other list' but I just can't get my self to unfriend them. As in a symbolic act of a real life death of a real life relationship. A simple unfriend. I just can't get myself to do it. I mean, we stop calling each other. We don't send Christmas cards anymore. No happy birthdays. No visiting in the hospitals. No 'how are your kids?'.

The dead friendship keeps on floating and bloating on my Facebook page and, even though I keep pretending not to see it, like the dead white fish in my aquarium, it's there and I know I would feel much better if I get it out of there.

I miss the good old days of no social networks when the dead friendship would just be lost in the open sea of palpable face to face human relations. My man will take care of the fish when he comes home. I should probably do the same with my dead friendships.