The Wishing Pond, by Ross Kelly


I.

      I was winding down the road, alone watching the curves as I knew the world here so well. In my way was nothing but the spirit of the world, hopping out in patches in front of my headlights. It was serine being where I was, with no one to tie me down, no place of my own behind me.
      In-between my thoughts and the reception of the world around me was a large cloud of haze, altering my perception to which I thought the world was judging me through. This haze no doubt influenced the way the world thought of me, almost cutting me off entirely from my decisions and the time I am in right now. I lifted yet another thought from my mind, trying to place it among the thoughts on the other side without letting the scared perception of thought which was clearly not intended to halt. I wished I could halt this, but the world is far more complicated than the cries of a lonely hearted child within a large world.
      Pulling to the base of the hill, I darted right, as if it felt a little better than passing time going the wrong way down the road.
      I pulled until the night caught me in its track, then slowed down to let it pass me by, pulling me deeper into the darkness, holding myself posed half heartedly within the presence of my cheaper possessions and my valiant metal-hearted car.

      I drifted into a deserted parking lot, looking towards my friends though a haze which was not all together unpleasant, knowing that it was a duel sided mirror, letting my intentions run with me so long as I could grasp a breath of air to speak through. The colors of the night reflected off the dark asphalt hiding itself in blackness. This was surely one of the final days I would feel this way.

      We hung together, but in my mind, it was much less a close nit group than everyone else perceived. I felt tension rising within my chest as I decided that the carefree days of childhood were over. Walking toward a shallow bench amongst a grassy patch to the side of a trail, I settled into my role amongst the people, gazing to the tall trees over us, and the water out to the right. I wished my role was something different, but I knew I had to live through this moment in order to find myself out on the other side of the haze, in the brightness again, within the day.
      Within the moment, I explained my feelings toward the world without regard to my own opinions or sense of self, pulling at God, feeling the way I did. I shouted and talked all together too fast.
      I pulled words faster than my mind could think, offering a genuine impression of my reality, swinging my sword as a pen in the air. Asking God to clear my mind, I had already cleared it and was again alone without myself, amongst a mess of yet another teenage tragic scene. This time though, it was clearly different and unique.
      I was hanging with my good friends, only perching myself among the men, trying to make sense of both sides of the story before I acted, taking another step downwards onto the the ground, climbing down from a grey granite rock back to the earthy dirt.
      I stayed and talked very few words, then collected myself, finding a friend to take me home, a place which had long since lost its meaning.
      Sitting among the mess of my childhood, I organized my possessions next.
II.       Once again tired among the night, seeing a fog of mysticism before me, I looked back to a brighter day, seeing it too held far from my sight. The days before I believed in magic, power, and the infinite possibility of the mind are hardly tainted by this thought.
      I feel comfort knowing that though space may be limited, there is only so much matter to deal cards with. It is almost painful thinking how this world feels so empty. I have given out too much of my own self, thinking both selfishly and selflessly. Looking into the past few moments, I think of a small yellow helicopter, one which I spent the day fixing, ready to fly like I did in my brightly colored room, full of interesting hews and colors of both darkness and pure ocher characteristics.
      Looking toward tomorrow, I can only hope that the fog lifts like it did today, only to find it settling back into such a place again tonight. I implore the reader; have you felt a solution to this problem? I don’t want to lose my prized possessions today, and tomorrow I want to work toward pulling myself together, surrounding myself with things that I love, only to find that it seems the tendency of the world it was to take from me without my regard.
      In the past, I laid down my records of my life for the world to see. I videotaped myself and friends riding skateboards through the local terrain, never quite getting a handle of the board, always pushing myself to the next level, only momentarily feeling confident in my scratched shoes, uneven with my style laid down on the wood, the metal trucks and bearings and rubber wheels. My shoes were tore with good times and the video I eventually compiled left me with no regrets, looking beautiful to my tastes, all played to my favorite song by Cake.
      My friends also laid down their own videos, as we each sat down at the computer alone atop a warm hill, too steep for many people to wander past. The computer was friendly and forgiving, and outside stood a tall wooden structure made by us by purely free materials as we walked through the world collecting bits and pieces from where we could, even taking a hand to remove pieces for a better good, ensuring that we left no holes within the gaps we were filling in as we boarded up the sides of the house and floor, as it stood on log stumps, bark filling the base of the structure letting it stand tall on its own hill, a pathway only trodden by those who cared to find it.
      I was in school at this time, learning about math, science, art, literature, and the fringes of what people were understanding within this new world of technology. I had my fair share of experience, knowing computers from the days of DOS and command prompt where I could boot up my favorite programs such as Jazz Jackrabbit, blasting simple enemies with my two dimensional guns.
      One day I left that world to find that the three dimensional man I was controlling had powers to tap into other people’s worlds, far away without becoming too personal. I knew at this time, being a young child, that this could easily become personal. Yet I played games under my alias, stopping from time to time to browse a vulgar and simple internet, finding pleasant stops within the world to call home. I also stopped quite often to share bitmap images in the shape of sound-waves, creating a library of song and instrument. This, mind you was before the days when sharing such files in this manner became illegal. Still, I held onto my songs, creating new songs for myself and others as I went along, sharing files back and forth, trying to stay safe seeing that this world was stacked in a bizarre order. Through my words and sung songs, I played the piano and used the desk table as percussion, eventually growing into a young boy, playing my new guitar singing when I could, then continuing the song later.
      Through my work of song, I felt comforted, reaching through the dark muck of society through to the top where healthy normal people lived carefree. I felt the pressure of this force upon me, both the light steps of the normal people, and the perverted mess of crooks and liars, proud to be a part of something destructive within the world. I tried to collect myself and help those around me, but I knew that within this world, I would always be fighting such a mess without result or redemption. That is, unless there is a tall order of conduct that seems to hold true for so much of the world. I would jump into this world within a plague of my own, cured of sickness, but not entirely immune to anything whatsoever.
      For the moment though, it is hard to look back and find a good order within which to tell the story, in order to make it come out in not only the truth of the situation, but the context in which it eventually made sense to me. Let me start here to say that there is no true tragedy within this story, although it is full of pain, tears, uproar, and gratitude, only smiling when I find the chance to feel better or happy. The majority seems lighthearted, because it was, and when epiphany strikes, I am always prepared to face the consequence, or to stop it in its tracks.

III.

      Sitting in my chair, I spawned in a dusty field, surrounded by the stone walls of an ancient catacomb, one which was always exposed to the light of day, even as night passed through. I dropped to the ground as the timer clicked to start the game, quickly buying an assortment of weapons, strategizing my next place to go. My team was beside me, but I sometimes do not feel like a team player, and instead head up the dusty staircase towards a tunnel, enclosed overhead, with three separate doorways out.
      Across the other side, counter-terrorist troops spawned facing our direction, loading their weapons with ammunition, buying grenades and flash grenades, perhaps throwing smoke at our processors, mucking people within the resolution of the game, firing sluggishly, running poorly through the confusion.
      I watch myself grip the wooden handle of an AK47 rifle, quickly toggling to my standard knife, running faster without the gun in hand. Pulling out my glock pistol at a close distance to the wide open archways, the only one on our side, I pulled out the rifle again and started to toggle back and forth between the two guns, thinking about which way to aim, slowing down, and realizing that my music is playing too loud to hear their footsteps. I hardly find it pleasing to be so careful regardless. I jumped to the left, shooting at the firsts enemy I saw hitting him in the head and chest, as his body dropped to the ground. His computer moved outside the realm to a spectating place where he could only chat with the other dead members in the game, while watching it continue until the round was over.
      A few of my teammates had gone up a ramp the right of the staircase I had passed, and went all the way straight then down to the left, carrying an explosive bomb and their weapons, ready to blow up crates full of counter-terrorist explosives.
      I went through the tunnels as a few other teammates followed in both directions, a few staying on this side of the walls, waiting to ambush. As the first enemy dropped, I pulled out my glock and shot two more men as I quickly jumped out into the main doorway down further down the hall. Turning the corner I laid to men two the ground then backed out of the doorway, shooting all the way across the room in bursts to keep my accuracy up. The fourth man went down, and the bomb had passed me by and was planted at the B site to my left, a vacated area with boxes and a platform on which there was a counterterrorist hiding. He put my two teammates into spectator mode as I bunny hopped around the door and unloading my rifle, then toggling through to my pistol, unloading it as well. Both of us were low on health, and seeing an opportunity I lunged forward, slashing then stabbing him with my knife, leaving him to run from the bomb.
      Outside I reloaded my gun and as a mistake, I was killed by the blast of the bomb, searing out through the crack in the doorway from the bombsite, bringing me to an instant death.
      I turned down the speakers and pulled back the menu browser, pulling up another program named kaZa-lite. I pulled back a few files from the shared folder, making them once again mine. I turned on another program in the background, pulling up the internet as well, moving through the text based database quickly using URLs to sort which page I wanted to use. At the same time I hung out and listened within the room, letting the beta files play. As I did such, I looked up strategy to my favorite consol games, and then turned to another area of the internet simultaneously, pulling up information on my favorite TV show. I loved learning the different power levels of the characters and wondering how one was going to defeat the other without reading ahead in the plot. As I did this, I sorted through the fan-fiction of the TV show, and then sat down once more to find myself interested in creating a site of fan-fiction my own. So, I pulled some text from another website, knowing now that one cannot truly copywrite the sequence of commands in a command prompt, but mostly only the commands themselves. Well, this is not the case actually. In this case I did not see a copywrite sticker within the page, so I pulled out a whole webpage from someone else’s mind, and put it in a website compiler at Fortune City, and then tinkered with the commands to fit a style that I liked in order to display what was on my mind. There was no point really in ‘stealing’ this from someone else’s site, but rather it just made it faster to create a quick dictionary with which to copy and paste, then arrange with my own text and pictures. It wasn’t as simple as it sounds, and continues to be a complicated pursuit of my own.
      Perhaps before this book is read by the read, I am now thinking, I will build the completed version of that site, which was simplistic but genius on its own account after several days of work. The sound drew me in as I comfortably plopped back onto the worn-out cushion wearing myself stiffer by the moment, dropping back into a mild comfort. Somehow, electrically, I am convinced the music pulled my mind into a compilation of new sound naturally creating itself with the commands of those computers and others linked. In my opinion, as I listened and shared music, pictures, and movies on the market system of shared files, I thought I made an influence on many of these songs, but in other cases, certainly, I can say directly that I created files that are ensured my own. I pulled myself out of these worlds, and back to my desktop, typing a few bits of homework into pieces, as I turned off the music, stopping for a second to play my upright piano behind and amassment to the computer, tapping and holding a few simple notes, not knowing the exact magnitude of what I was playing, playing without any instruction in piano. I typed the remainder of my work and printed out a copy, saving it to a folder hidden within a briefcase on the desktop in plain view appearing as another folder with nothing inside but the text documents. You do not have to understand this part here because it relates to a family business my father runs, and it is his business to sort the details of such things. I, luckily, do not need to understand it all the time, but rather just know enough to use it and its interface effectively.
      In the coming moths and years, time ticked by slowly, and I will come back to such events, but for now lets say we hop into an airplane, watching myself learn piano from a great Russian composer, playing songs, but never practicing, only learning the songs when he sat me down and made me play until the lesson was over. Unfortunately, I forgot every song I ever played during those times, but I know he put down some of my thoughts in good faith, writing down notes as we went along, showing two different clefs at the beginning of the song, denoting the parts each of us played. This instrument was much less forgiving in my mind than the guitar, and looking back at my music career, beginning in boy’s chorus, I evolved taking on the role which I wanted to in music. I did not mind voicing my opinions while singing, or playing an instrument, feeling like it is really much easier to not give worry a chance to have thought, and that inevitably leads to little embarrassment with the people around me.

III.

      I stood in a park shaded by redwood trees, littering the road with trunks and roots cracking the single road passing through into a tangle of residential houses climbing deep into the woods and over the hill back to the main strip where an old movie theater stood, to be renovated in just over a few years later. The park was covered in a canopy and the old metal construction within the park held a history of many years of adults and children passing through on their way home or to another place. It was nightfall, and out of the darkness shapes started to appear before my eyes. My body changed into a wooden beast riddled with years of unknown human suffering and history. Walking towards a swing set, I turned to look for my friends, but all I saw were wooden masks floating in the air, encompassing different personalities, not altogether unpleasant, but certainly deeply rooted in a pain which I could not understand at this moment in my life.
      One of my distant friends pulled up, and my close friend and I hopped into his car, shaded in our own worlds. I hopped out, knowing nothing more would harm me, and that this exchange of ideas was clouded within our personalities and altogether beneficial without sharing our own thoughts. A bunch of our friends had followed us from my friend’s clean wooden house atop his hill. On the way to the park, I had clung to the side of a green sport utility vehicle, letting go as the park passed me by, hopping back into a strange reality, letting the car drive off in peace, as my mind became more potent with these strange thoughts. I tried to communicate normally without worry for my own visions, not letting on to anyone that they scared me, because in truth they didn’t. I did not hide the fact that I was on some sort of trip through time, while standing perfectly still.
      My friend and I met up with his mother, and she drove us in a BMW suv into San Francisco, to a nice clothing shop. She offered to buy us a jacket, I was unsure, but my friend pulled out a nice jacket lined with fur. He was from Russia, and he and his parents had moved in to the United States when we were in middle school. We had become friends during late middle school into high school, and became very good friends when we played football together on the same team, starting freshman year. By early sophomore year, we became skating buds and spent time after school wandering around on our skateboards and by foot, finding places to learn new tricks.
      On the way back from the clothing store, we stopped at Goodwill and in there his mom purchased us a few items of clothing which I still have till today, and also a greet baseball cap with an owl on the front supporting some sort of environmental meeting. I put the hat on backwards and pulled my hair out the bottom of the plastic snaps below the hat. It was an unfortunate day, seeing as I loved that hat, and people seemed to see it fitting me at school as I went through a few weeks, getting good grades, and chatting while drawing and painting in art class. Apparently my penmanship is not very realistic seeing as I drew myself in that hat and everyone agreed it looked like I drew my face far to wide and fat, seeing as I was playing football at the time, and in quite good shape by sophomore year.
      The unfortunate day came in another tangled mess of days this time. I was in my friends car smoking, sitting in the back with my good friend, as two other guys I respected a bunch were sitting in the driver’s seat and in shotgun. I put the hat down along with my jacket and a bunch of other clothing. So as to not let it get ruined by the smoke. However, looking back, as we left, my friend had collected all the clothing items and the hat was nowhere to be found. It is unfortunate that I lost that black baker’s sweatshirt as well, one which my friend had found outside after a crazy night, another item of clothing that I wish I to still have in my possession today. My style of dress didn’t evolve to match those two items of clothing until my junior year of high school, but I digress, this is a different part of the story.

Cars and Stars and movies

Note to self:
Counter-terrorists
Inside-out
Spectating
Glock
Laid
Listen
Worn-out