The Pond

(I wrote this a couple months ago, and dug it up while I was deleting things from my mac)

On the peak of this typical Summer day, you won’t find where all the blinding lights are coming from, as the sun is shining too bright for you to look farther past the climbing tree lines. Painfully, almost all you can see is white, white, white, beaming from the skies and the reflections of water, finding all the angles to drench every inch of your skin in warmth.

Lucky for me, I had other things to search for. My overalls saved my dragging legs from splinters as I laid flat across the edgeless wooden bridge that hovered over a thick, green pond. My little feet only reached a quarter into the width of the big brown bridge, so my dad would always look over my way every now and then to see if any tourists had tripped over me or stepped on my toes, so he’d know when to scoop me back up into his arms. Yes, my family left me alone there. No, not to die, or to be kidnapped, or to be scared into behaving properly that afternoon – but because laying on that bridge was my favorite part about going to D.C. I never cried or complained about the half hour drive in the seat-less back of my father’s stinking station wagon, even if I had to share the shoebox of a space with five other cousins and a car-sick brother.
“Jenny, you get the backdoor seat.”
“Whyyy?”
“Because you’re the lightest, so you probably won’t pop the backdoor open and fly out like the rest of us would.”
And with that, I’d always imagine that so help me God, if I leaned as much as an unbalanced knee cap on that backdoor, I’d be sent flying out into the blinding whites to never be seen again by my wide-eyed cousins for the rest of their cramped, wagon-riding days.
But I knew that eventually, somewhere along the trip, my dad would buy me a salty hot dog – you know, from one of those sweaty venders that seemed to sell more food than their mini trailers seemed to hold – so I grabbed on to my cousins’ shoes and silently waited through the trip for my juicy reward. Secondly – I knew that I’d get to lay on the bridge to stare down into the pond and look for my mustache monsters. Yes, the grayish looking fish that were half my size, and always popped up amidst the swarm of ducks that fought over the bits of bread, and flicked their little tube-like mustaches before sinking back into the green again. The ducks would always wiggle away when the monsters revealed themselves every couple of minutes to steal another wad of honey wheat, and I could never help but giggle when the ducks fluttered away like something horrible was going to swallow them up. Silly duckies, they just want ‘nom-nom’s like you do, I thought.
This vivid memory was retraced as I reminisced, laying on the same exact bridge fourteen years later, under the beaming whites of the moon light. I was accompanied by a near stranger who took me back here without knowing its significance, after sharing an uncomfortable cup of coffee together at a nearby Starbucks’. I laid where I had always laid before, but this time, my feet reached past more than half of the bridge’s width, and below me – no matter how many crackers I dropped, there were no monsters or fleeing ducks – just an abyss of gentle, black waves that shook my reflection.
“Jennie, aren’t you cold?”
“No, I’m-“
“Take my jacket.”
It was well below freezing that night, but my mind was too lost in the dark skies in the reflections of the pond – what used to be a green glass that I looked through to another world of mustached-monsters and other creatures waiting to surface to the irresistible honey wheat – had turned into a simple, cold, black pool of a world that I already knew.