Pond Water

The pond was nothing special. Scummy and barely six feet across. Spongy green and stinking, nestled between unremarkable trees. There was no clamorous buzzing of insects or soft golden light. There was no feeling of surreal goodness or impending destiny, but I had heard from the tavern locals that it was the place to go if you had a broken soul. It was the place you went to right everything. A place, the locals proclaimed, would take you back in time.

I stepped into that tepid water, half drunk, half hating myself. Geosmin squished between my toes, and I thought, how stupid. How gross. What a waste of my Saturday. At first, I stood chest-deep with sticks poking my bare feet and tadpoles swimming around my knees. Decayed leaves released their stench as their corpses floated up to caress me. The algae that plagued the surface inching ever closer.

What was I supposed to do? Was there an incantation I needed to say? Was I meant to think of a time I wanted to go back to? Should I have bolstered the courage to ask for instructions?

How dumb. How utterly stupid could I be? How- the mud opened beneath me, and I fell more through air than water into darkness. Into a crushing void. Into quicksand.

I came to face down in long grass with a pounding headache. The air was warm and thick with summer. The faint fetor of a dead animal hovered upon the humidity. Someone was singing off-key nearby. A child’s voice. I sat up. My voice.

There I was. Six years old, singing alone in the woods. Happy and free, but I knew the truth. I knew she was hiding before she knew what she was doing. I knew she hated herself before she had the words to express it. No, she always had the words. She just never had the brashness.

I began to stand, to confront her, to stop her, but stalled. I watched her through the wild grass. Already deep in her mind. Already guarded against everything. Aloof. Intelligent. Lost. Angry. So angry I wanted to kill her right there. So angry I wanted to punish her. She was so small. So weak. I could do it. I could end it all for both of us. I could save her.

A few feet from me, she stopped and covered her nose with her hand, presumably finding the dead thing that tainted the air. She didn’t run away, as most children would. She regarded it, curious and then ashamed of her curiosity. Ashamed of the darkness that had always been more friend than foe. I crawled closer; I wanted to see what she saw.

A twig snapped under my palm. Heart racing, I flattened. She whirled around, scanning the grass for wolves, or aliens, or dinosaurs. None of the things that she should actually be afraid of. None of the things that would hurt her. She took stock of the silence before continuing her quest. I knew where she was going.

The creek was borne from the many branches of the Sangamon River. It cut through the back acre of my parent’s property, carrying adventure and mystery and occasionally danger when the rains were heavy. The waters would come creeping through the tall prairie grasses, saturating the ground transforming the woods into a swamp. I remember pulling on my rainboots to brave the shallow waters. I was sure they harbored alligators and leviathans, but I tested them for the chance to discover something mysterious.

Today, the creek was ordinary and safe.

I watched my younger self from the shadows of a White Oak. She went to play in the mud. To become dirty and then clean again. To take off her shoes and challenge her balance over the stony bed. She went to marvel at the water skeeters skirting the tension and to catch tiny frogs that darted in her wake. She went to be alone with her thoughts as she followed the sparkling trail of snail slime across a broad leaf.

She smiled and bent closer to the opaque white shell, moving deliberately. She plucked it from its path and turned it over; the creature receded from her gaze. A quiet moment passed. Sunlight caught in her unruly hair. Delicate shell caught between her fingertips. A blue dragonfly hovered over the burbling water, hunting, humming.

My hand sunk into moss as I watched. I drove my fingers into the soft fauna, delicate roots snapping under my touch. The grooves of the tree bark etched pleasantly into the knots between my shoulder blades. The sun winked between the leaves. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, my younger self was placing the snail back on the leaf. It rolled off. She retrieved it from the stones only to drop it again. Steadily, intently, she balanced it on a sturdy spot near the stem. The snail unfurled and resumed its measured march along the path already lain.

Deep in the disillusionment of my adulthood, I was ready to die. But as I watched her singing and making up stories, I realized that she wasn’t ready to die. She didn’t know all the things she would be missing out on. All the things that she would love and all the things that she would hate. The people she would meet. How much confidence she would gain. How much bravery. How much pain. She couldn’t go, not yet.

Which meant I couldn’t go. I was condemning her to years of misery. To near-death experiences, and broken hearts, and disappointment. She would suffer. But maybe when she became despondent, she would remember how it felt to play in the mud and how it was to wash in clear water. The simple joy of a snail pressing on. The feeling of a frog wriggling in her palm. Cold water over smooth stones. Moss underhand. Perhaps she would want to go back in time and relive her childhood. Maybe this time, she would carry it with her.