the wildness of my imagination

we have an in-ground pool in my backyard. we just put it in a couple of years ago, just past the time when it would have been convenient to have it and we would have been little enough to get a lot of use out of it, but hey, you'll never hear us claim that our family makes sensible decisions.

my pool is a really cool color. it's this unreal blue, not quite sapphire and not quite turquoise but a mesmerizing combination of the two. it's the kind of color that merely looking at it makes you want to dive into it, slowly sink beneath the surface, because that kind of blue hints at coolness and silk, so why don't you just come on in?


i could stare at my pool for hours. the way the sunlight sparkles off the surface of the water, the patterns the light and ripples make on the bottom. i sit there and imagine that there are things in my pool. not gross things like toads and insects and turtles, though turtles really aren't that gross, i just couldn't really come up with any other horrifying water things. but the things that i'm thinking of are fairy-tale things. i imagine that creatures like water fairies and sparkling fish and tiny intelligent seahorses are frolicking in my pool, only i can't see them because they are in a dimension just beyond my reach, because after all, this world doesn't really believe in magic, and as soon as you hit thirteen you are forced to accept that really cool and interesting things like fairies and dragons don't really exist.






but sometimes, in the late afternoon, when it's quiet and lazy like it can only be on a languid summer day, there are water fairies and intelligent seahorses. and they live in the curve of the deepest part of my pool.