Lake Dystopia

I stared into the water but all I could see was black, and maybe that is exactly how it was supposed to be. There was no reflection, not even of the moon, which glistened in the clear and starless sky, and there were no signs of the murky secrets held within the magical Lake Dystopia.

    Lake Dystopia is a place that can bring joy and laughter, but it is also a place to have brought pain and anguish. The age-old question of if the glass is half-full or half-empty seems rather pertinent, because sometimes there is no middle ground.

    Children play here, lovers make love here, and the sweet and innocent ones come to dream here. Some of those children have drowned here; many of those lovers have broken hearts here, while the sweet and innocent ones are just thankful to God that they are safe, here. And that's perhaps why everything is just black. There is simply too much history to consider anything other than incendiary darkness.

    Some say that on certain nights you can still hear both the laughs and screams of some of those whose stories became a thing of legend. It is during the summer when death livens up, disrupting the calm and tranquility which aids the final glimpses of the evening sun. Kind of like how a werewolf morphs as the moon begins to rise, how a fish bounces in and out of the water, the ripples majestically sauntering in the neon glow. But this utopia doesn't last for long, disturbed by memories of the past and therefore thrown into turmoil once again.

    There were the childhood sweethearts, in love and inseparable, taking a midnight skinny dip like so many other couples had done before them, but their luck was to run out one fateful night when things went awry and their bodies washed ashore the very next morning. How they both drowned remains a mystery, unless of course it was simply meant to be. Then there was, who we shall call "X" for now, although everyone around here knows his name. His striking presence struck fear into all who came across him- even the authorities dare not touch him, so quite how "X" ended up at the bottom of the lake with a bullet hole in his temple remains quite the conundrum. The water was the only thing to shed a tear over his demise that night, because for the rest of the town, their world felt a far safer place upon his welcome departure.

    The stories go on and the more I think of this place, the only thing I see is death. I smell it at every step, I breathe it in and it begins to choke me, and then I vomit nothing but parasitic air. The lake has become a toxic place, somewhere to avoid as if your life literally depends on it; and that never used to be the case.

    There has also been a lot of happiness here, but we will always remember it for the bad things, as one-by-one, each story of tragedy turns this setting of immense beauty into an ugly shadow of its former self. And what a pity it is, a place which used to be so perfect, ruined by the unreliability and selfishness of the human race. I swear I hear the death clock beginning to chime once more.

    The reflection of the starlit sky once held such mysticism, a cerebral enchanting capable of taking your breath away in astonishment, but now I am left in desolation, in delusion, and at a loss to describe or even understand nature's impending wrath. One day we will take a long hard look at ourselves and realise that every little thing we do has an effect on something far greater than what we could ever imagine. Why drag down the wonderful when it would be much easier and more natural to fade away on our own.

    Every once in a while, the lake is left to its own devices, without fear of attack or recompense. She glides and settles and repeats her actions with no more disdain than boredom, and in this moment she is mesmerising. She offers the kind of solace which occurs far less frequently these days, but when we are treated to it, we dare not forget such moments that border on transcendent.

End.