You say fuck the lakefill, but I still miss green

For P.

Two blocks and seven swarms of fireflies away from the lake, there’s a bookstore I never entered. I only looked through the windows when the sun hit it right and saw a shadowed reflection of myself in the dark glass, felt the warm light on my back. White-edged water droplets stain parts of the window, curling into yinyang signs and disappearing into glass so black it’s almost green, like it’s the apocalypse or an instagram chrome filter.

When I relive this memory, I stand in front of the window until the sun goes down—until I can’t see my reflection anymore, until dew gathers on the backs of my hands and drips down my finger-veins, leaving me, empty.

Here, the lake water is made of mini, jagged, moving mountains, crashing into each other like a School of Rock-style showdown of two marching bands: all pieces and then all one. I’ve never really known blue water, only the brownish inky remains of oil spills and plastic bottles left to the gritty sands, where they’ll remain long after the luminescent green bodies have turned to stone and back. But even on this gray day, the kind of day where your body doesn’t cast a shadow, the blueness still clings onto the water. I turn my hands over, check if the water clings onto me.

Two strands of grass, slightly longer than the others, form a seventy-five-degree angle with each other. They poke out from the ground like a stick figure failing its circus dancer training, unable to stretch itself into a single-leg uttanpadasana. Wind shakes the lower leg as though encouraging the grass to cheat by bending its calf. I laugh. The leg lazily springs back up, mid-afternoon lazy, muscles still stinging.

It’s more circles than lines. Most things. I picture someone lightly pressing a small round brush of acrylic paint over tree bark, speckling it with yellow-edged spots of deadish moss. This is not how moss grows, but it is how it appears to me. Pointilistic, circles comprised of smaller circles. The tree bark itself is less circles and more blobs—orange, black, and brown, but mostly white—that blob together until they’re bigger blobs, amoebas whose silhouettes change with the slightest shift in perspective.

When I lean back, soft edges turn into harsh lines: the dry ridges and sharp chasms of the bark. I trace along the ridges and find that the patterned lines on the back of my thumb imitate the tree, with small dots of white where dead skin begs for water.

It’s unsettling to be out by the lake, alone, at night. I sit along the concrete benches, as close to the lampposts as possible, as though light could strip away this fear: the sound of the water, crashing against these painted rocks as though there are arms and legs beating against cold waves, frantically seeking air. It frightens me.

It sounds like someone drowning.

The water crashes against the rocks with violent noise but refuses to cling. It slides right off the rocks, as though it was reminding the rocks that they are the disturbance—that perhaps they are not supposed to be there, that they are filling something that never needed to be filled in the first place.

There is one light from across the lake that shines brighter than the others. It is probably only half a mile away, something I could reach if I just kept walking. This green-ish hued light, although I cannot tell exactly what it is, creates a conical strip across the water, connecting me to it. A sector or pie slice, quite thin, and over which the light gleams—smudged ellipses, glowing. Nearest the light source and closest to the wedge center, the light appears like a cartoon swarm of white flies, moving quickly. Appearing and disappearing. My face, wet and cold, and the water, too dark to see it.

Read more from Issue No. 38 or share on X.