The Lake

“Don’t leave me,” I begged softly, though there was no one around to hear it.

The words hung in the air like mist, dissolving into the stillness. The lake stretched out before me, quiet, unbothered, its surface a smooth pane of silver under the early morning light. It hadn’t changed, not really.  The same gentle curve along the shoreline, the same leaning trees with roots exposed like old bones, the same patch of reeds where we used to hide and whisper secrets like we were fugitives from the world.

In summer, we swam here until our lips turned blue and the sun sank behind the trees. We’d race to the dock, cannonball in, then lie on towels that smelled of mildew and sunscreen. In winter, the lake froze into a sheet of glass. We laced up our skates and carved loops and figure-eight across it, pretending we were weightless. We fell so often our elbows bruised, but we laughed anyway.

It all looked the same.

And yet, none of it felt familiar anymore.

I climbed the trail up the hill; passing the old oak the one we once called "The Queen." We had made crowns from pine needles, woven belts of ivy, and left little twig offerings at its roots. We’d believed in magic. Magic had rules, and places like this were full of it.

That was the thing about childhood, we didn’t just live in the world; we belonged to it. We believed the earth knew us, cared for us. We weren’t separate from it. We were it.

The same wildflowers still bloom here every spring. I saw a few poking through the underbrush, just as they had when we used to pick them by the fistful and shove them into jars of lake water. The same cold rain comes every November : thin, grey, and endless. And every summer morning, I swear the birds still sing that three-note call, the one we turned into a song of our own.

We loved the earth because we knew her. Because she kept her promises. It was always the same flower coming up every spring, the same chill in the air when the leaves began to fall, the same slow, cold rain in November. The same birdsong greeting us each morning. Everything was loved because it was known.