Creative Nonfiction
Image by Unsplash+
In Richmond, the trees are not where they should be. In their gangly adolescence, each was planted in a rectangular bed along the curb; situated 40 feet apart, the beds leave ample space for the canopies to spread, but measuring six-by-eight-foot, they are perhaps too small for the lower half. The roots of the oldest trees, older than the inhabitants who live indoors, have extended from their little box and into the sidewalks, creating fault lines for us to leap over. This is an unseemly sight, so the newer trees have stricter confinements, and their roots shoot downward and tangle into knots. Still, we marvel at their trunks, so deeply grooved a finger tracing a furrow could be lost, and we appreciate the shade and their leaves that blur into a cloud and turn the horizon green.
Though affluence typically precedes their planting, sometimes they stand before the bodegas and affordable housing of rougher areas, where night like a festering mold settles into the crevices before creeping up the brick walls and saturating the wood paneling; and where the residents drop beer bottles, cigarette butts, and bubble gum for someone, like me to someday step on. The trees witness everything, but they neither sigh nor laugh as I once hoped they would; instead, they stay listlessly still, growing upwards in silence, doing exactly what they were intended to do.
When I arrived in Richmond, I had expected the solitude of the trees, but the loneliness of the people I had not. Like the college campus where I had recently departed, there were always human beings nearby, seemingly waiting for someone, anyone, to simply tap them on the shoulder and say, hello. At bars they sat hunched over the counter, finishing their beer before it gets warm, but exchanging murmurs with the cadence of their breath. And they await at much more humbling options, like a church congregation and its cardboard smiles, or meetups that seem eager to undermine the shared interest for an inclusivity. At every gathering I found the lonely smiling nervously and using a lexicon composed solely of popular idioms and slang, for it seems they were okay with reducing themselves to an identity more easily fathomed, and thus more approachable. I deplored this desperation, accrediting it to a weakness of character.
Yet it was a weakness I shared. I formed acquaintanceships at countless settings and later donned a French crop and repeated the words of Twitch streamers as if they could ring like in-jokes with total strangers. Nevertheless, I left the social events because I was unwilling to submit to their social customs, and my hair grew shaggy as I dropped the adopted identity, precisely because it was not my own. Thus, my urge for human connection, always charged and ready to shoot sparks, directed its energy to an entity that couldn't sap me of my "authenticity": the city itself. Of course, its architecture and commotion and the trees that witness it all couldn't quiet the pangs of loneliness; rather, in my resolve to stay genuine, my sorrows became meaningful. Perhaps that was enough. In any case, I was becoming irreparably odd.
What corrected my estrangement was nature: the nature of the city. Every evening around midnight, I walked the same route, and along that ritualized route was a pond. Its name actually contained the designation of "lake," and it even had signs posting fishing limits, but the lake, or really the pond, couldn't have been bigger than several blocks, and never once had I seen a fisherman along its bank.
Naturally, a body of water, a luxury in a city, drew the inhabitance of the wealthy; surrounding it were mansions, both in the colonial and modern styles, owned, I assumed, by business VP's or executives. I could never validate this assumption, for I never saw them. Nor did I desire to. Their presence would, I presumed, have exuded an air of superiority, of belittling wealth, the same impression of their houses. At least their houses stood only to be admired.
Before these mansions and the smooth residential streets, a paved walkway circled the pond, and around it my route took several laps. Always, it was just me, the sleep of the reputable, and the trains far off in the distance, whose regular whistling seemed keen on reminding me of the hour. There were ducks too, but by midnight they had migrated to the lone island in the middle, which, it seemed, was inadequate for their shelter. All night they squawked and rustled through its brush, a commotion I was unable to explain for quite some time.
On one February evening, their activity was noticeably absent. I strode around the pond as I normally did, persevering through the brisk air—as brisk as a southern winter can be—and awakening to a state of wonder. Within me, the external cares of the day compressed into a dense core, and this core, becoming forgotten with each bounding step, leaving just remnants to mix with my little self, my true self, finally burst through my physical encasing. In wave-like form, I ricocheted from the mansions and bouncing off the pond, before escaping to the depthless reaches of the clear grey sky above. The crescent moon was no brighter than a sticker on a ceiling, but lighting my path was the sickly yellow light of lamp posts, which, if viewed from above, may have looked like a necklace of faded pearls. A slight breeze ruffled the surface of the pond, and ripples of the black water lapped against the concrete embankment below me, almost washing over and wetting my shoes.
Suddenly, I spotted another. Only fifty feet ahead, on the ledge of the embankment, was an animal no larger than a cat. In the dim light, its body was a silhouette of black fur, with some extremity jutting above. This then lowered, and as its body lowered to the cement, the animal began shaking wildly as if in a shiver. My chest drew stiff. I advanced, synchronizing each breath with silent step, becoming cognizant of the cold and the unwanted embrace of the wind. I too began to shiver.
The animal froze: the extremity rose above the shape of its body, and two orbs of pale-yellow light shone back to me. Against my efforts to stay perfectly still, my hands stretched and contracted into fists. The pressure of my weight shifted to the very tips of my toes, and the tremors of my heart warned me that ahead lie danger.
I chuckled: the animal was small and it was clearly frightened, and I should not be so cautious. I resumed my normal gait. Once I could discern that its fur was brown, not black, I had come close enough: it leaped into the lake. I continued forward, approaching where it had once crouched, while my gaze stayed level over the trembling surface of the pond, hoping to see my new acquaintance again. And finally, it re-emerged: twenty feet from the embankment something like a periscope broke the surface. It drifted away, as those eyes, still afire, stayed yet fixed on me.
I had interrupted its meal: at my feet was a catfish. Consumed was the meat beyond its dorsal fin, and its bony spine emerged like a bleach-white fossil. And what remained: the creature, half-eaten, still flapping and gasping, but with an eye already glazed over, looking up at me and begging for the heel of my shoe.