Rippled Reflections

I looked down, and in the water below I saw my life reflected in a series of images. It was like I was walking in a hall of mirrors. Reflections of myself were looking back at me from certain points in my life.

The first was my earliest memory. I couldn’t have been any more than three at the time. Mum was chasing me around the house, with a towel in one hand and a bar of soap in the other. I can remember giggling gleefully as I ran, annoying my mother more and more with each second that passed. I’d been playing outside, finger painting but had decided to use myself as the canvas instead and so I covered myself from head to toe in paint.

The second was of my first pet. A tiny little Italian grey hound. I’d been about 6, and at the time, had had just as much energy as the tiny, hypo energetic little dog. We had been chasing each other around the yard, but even though we were both had around the same level of energy, her four legs, even though they were tiny, beat my two. I simply couldn’t catch her.

Next. I was around twelve and rebellion was just beginning to set in. Mum and I were in the kitchen, screaming at one another across the counter. I’d been giving her attitude because she wouldn’t let me go to a party that weekend. At the time, it had been everything I’d cared about. One of the popular girls, yes, the popular girls was holding a pool party for her birthday and I’d been desperate to go because, maybe, just maybe, I’d have a chance at breaking in to the popular group. At the time, all I wanted was to be one of them.

After that was a memory from when I was around fourteen or fifteen. Many of my peers had recently been testing the boundaries, with things like drugs, drinking. Someone, I faintly recalled had even stolen at least two hundred dollars worth of makeup from Coles. Nasty rumours were flying around everywhere. It was a confusing time. The cruel nature of my peers combined with the hormones we all had raging through us, looking back, it had been, quite simply, hell. I was crying on my bed. The people who’d been my friends the day before had hated me that day. I can still remember screaming at my mother when she came in to console me. She wouldn’t understand. Get lost. Leave me alone.

The last reflection was from something that had happened earlier that year. It was just an ordinary day. I’d been with friends. I’d had a lot of them at the time. It was another long, dreary school day, but the parts that were spent with them seemed to last only five minutes. It was a break and we were just sitting together. It was one of my favourite memories. One of the happiest times I could ever remember.

As I closed my eyes, the reflected image memories all shattered like broken shards of a mirror. All the emotions went away and I felt nothing but the cold wind rushing past me as I fell. It felt like I’d hit glass as I hit the water and then nothing. All there was, was black.