// Contains memories of a pond.
When we moved into our new house, both my brother and I were asked what we wanted to have in our new garden. Between a swimming pool, a mini-soccer field, a skateboarding ramp, and an outdoor barbecue the only idea we could all agree on was a pond. I don’t know why my brother wanted a pond, but I wanted a pond because I had an aquarium in my room, and one of my favourite past times was to press my face against the glass and stare endlessly at the colourful fish and plants so brightly illuminated from the lamp above the water like it was a television.
For me, a pond was like the outdoor version of an aquarium, one that could contain fish, frogs, and best of all salamanders, whose yellow and black dotted bellies looked like the skin of wet pumas, and who were a rare find. So my father began digging and when he was done, before the hole was filled with water and turned into a pond, he upholstered the earth with this thick painter’s fleece, to protect the plastic layer above it against any puncturing from rocks or roots. I loved this painter’s fleece, because it looked as if somebody had been watching the noise on the television and then pressed pause on the remote, walked to the screen and had taken the screen out and turned it into a carpet. For me, it was so beautiful and rich in colours that it saddened me a little when this television screen disappeared under the black plastic, and consequently the water, the plants and fish that would dwell above it. In my mind, the painter’s fleece, not unlike the static that lay underneath each television channel and from which every television show, every movie, every cartoon would sprout, was like the static noise of the earth itself; a pulsating and vibrating layer of colourful noise, from which all life, plants, trees, and the pond in our backyard originated.