Childhood

Written by Avery Fogarty

Childhood. This place is nothing like I remembered. In fact, I can’t place a single object. No pebble here is as smooth as memory had maintained. No flower blooms as red as the day my eyes first saw red in its fullness. Memory paints a picture of a picture. How will She remember this? I sit on a wooden bench in the absence of the lush and throw my head back. It hits the upper rail. Does this place remember me? It did not welcome me as one might suspect of a friend, or a lover. Perhaps it is waiting for me to make a sign. The right signal could jog memory’s memory. I throw my hands up. Nothing. I wave. Silence. There is a small pond in front of the wooden bench. Someone is walking by on a date. They are talking about tadpoles excitedly, and immediately, I see one in the pond before me. Now two. Now many more than two. Their existence appears to be very separate from one another, but it is hard to consider them as individual. The small back legs just barely forming. Their hopeful bodies shooting up to the surface. I remember frogs. I remember my grandmother’s pond where we would listen to their frog song, and try to catch them if they were still and we were quick. I remember a night of secretly hoping I would fall into the shallow water. How I romanticized the theater of drudging home dripping wet with a story in my mouth. How my bare skin would graze the scales of a koi fish and how I would look up at my laughing mother coming to the rescue. The tone of her voice changing slightly as she calls up to my grandmother to bring us a towel. How she would wrap me too tightly as if to say,“ I’m sorry I let you go.” How I could hold on to that, if it had happened, as a good memory.