I had an unrequited love thing in college that never got resolved but I gave up and started trying to date. The second one sat me down one day and said we were only ever going to be friends. I was grumpy the rest of the night but when I got home I just crumbled to dust. We would have been a terrible match, so it was the right thing to do. I don’t even know that we would have been friends except we had one in common. I didn’t understand why I felt so unanchored around her and so we stopped hanging out. Which I realized is just the sort of thing women complain about with male friendships but what can you do.
It took a while to realize I wasn’t grieving her. I was jammed in the Denial phase of a previous loss and adding a few more rocks to the pile caused an avalanche. I’m betting that’s what happened with your goldfish.
Hmm, I've not really found that to be the case personally. Past that initial shit period up until my late teens, subsequent losses and grief has been quite different.
I absolutely lost it when a pet goldfish died ~5 years later. This kind of stuff can come up at the weirdest time.