I have to get home! It’s getting late – I can see the golden, amber afternoon sunlight playing on the leaves of the big oak – it will be dark soon. I have to get home before the sun sets! My daughters are at home, alone, so I have to get there before dark! Where the hell am I? I start looking around and try to find something that look familiar
I am inside a house, looking through a window at the back garden. On the far-end, there is a patio and a swimming pool…urgh…maybe a fishpond? Looks like the shape of a swimming pool though, with brown murky water, covered with slimy water-lilies. No, I still do not recognise anything and are getting more anxious by the minute, it’s a burning sensation in the pit of my stomach and screams in my head: YOU HAVE TO GET HOME!
Then I see him! A Pool-man? Gardener? Owner of the house perhaps? Wearing a large droopy hat with a leaf-net, collecting leaves out of the…I guess it’s a swimming pool, then. I look for a door to go to him, but there is none, and I start screaming to get his attention. He just carries on…humming and swaying the leave-net rhythmically sideways on the pool surface, ignoring me, not even looking up from what he is doing! I start thumping my fist against the window, while shrieking like a banshee: “Hey!!! HEY!! I have to go home!!! Let me out!! LET. ME. OUT!”. He stops and puts down the net…Did he hear me??? I now start yelling and pounding more frantically again. WTF?! He just put down the net to pick up a jar? And now it looks like he is feeding fish…in the swimming pool (now a pond again…)
I wish I could tell you that he eventually acknowledged me or that I could find out where I was, and who the house belongs to. But I cant. I can tell you that it was the longest twilight ever!! That sun just kept on colouring everything golden, but never set. It seemed to go on for days! Unfortunately my anxiousness to get home did not go away and just grew worse. The man did not stay in the garden the whole time. He would disappear into the house for long periods (that felt like days) and would come out numerous times, while I was there, to go through the same ritual of cleaning the pool and feeding the fish. Eventually I got the idea to look around the room, to find something to break the window with (Duh!! I know, I’m can be really special like that sometimes😏)
It’s then that I realised. I am in an Aquarium! I, sh*t you not!! A fish tank with fake plants, fake gravel, bubbles and even other fish!! In water…and the window I’ve been pounding is the front panel of the aquarium…and I am a fish…with a tail and fins. Yes, yes, I am also baffled by the fact that I could scream and hit glass, while swimming….under water…with no arms and no voice….but that is exactly how it was and I am telling the truth! As I look at my surroundings and fellow fish mate’s, I see a glimpse of a dark hole in the gravel, hidden under a plastic leaf of some fake vegetation. Mmmmm, wonder what that is? Casually I swim closer to get a look. It’s a hole alright. In the gravel. So of course you know that I entered the it, only to discover it’s a tunnel!!! A long, winding, narrow tunnel – and no, there was no light at the end of it😉)
But, this tunnel opened up into a larger, darker area of water…and it was not in the fish-tank. I looked around and as I gazed up, I notice the water seems less dark, sort of dark blue and start swimming towards it. As I swim towards the ‘Big Blue’😜 , the water starts turning into a lighter blue until it almost seem white….The next moment, my little fish body breaks through the surface of the water and arch through the air, golden sunlight shimmering on my scales! And I see, I see….I am in the swimming pool-pond!!! And then gravity tapped me on the shoulder (do fish have shoulders?) just to remind me that everything that goes up, has to come down …Instead of diving back into the pond, I flapped out of my hospital bed on a very cold ward floor….
Ridiculous right? Total insane nonsense, but also my first memory of my new life…
❤️