On Gonzo’s Pond: When the Water Leaves Before You Do

[Luis Gonzalez]

On Gonzo’s Pond: When the Water Leaves Before You Do

By Luis Gonzalez
Boiling Frogs

The drought is bad this year.

The pond has not only lowered. It has retreated into itself, as if it no longer trusts its own memory of fullness. What remains is a wide exposed ring of pale stone and cracked silt, the kind of ground that remembers water more faithfully than it holds it now. Light sits on it without softness. The reflection is too far to be visible. Only the water can be seen.

Nothing moves the way it should.

Even the air feels hesitant, as though it has forgotten how to pass through a place like this. The world here has become too legible, stripped of the small distortions that once made it forgiving.

There is a weight in that clarity. A pressure that comes not from change, but from its absence.

You do not sit the way you used to sit.

There is no comfort in arrival. Only the awareness that you have come here again with something unfinished in your hands. Indefinite goals sit in the mind like doors without rooms behind them. The future does not present itself as path anymore, only as exposure without map or shelter. It presses instead of invites. It asks without offering return.

And beneath that, something older begins to surface.

Not hope. Not despair.

Just fatigue that has learned its own shape.

You feel the pull backward. Not toward comfort, but toward familiarity. The past has become a place with edges you can touch. Even if those edges cut, they still define where you are. The future offers no such definition. It dissolves the moment you try to hold it.

You speak into the stillness. Not to explain yourself, but to place something back into a space that has held you before.

You say what you have heard before arriving here.

The pond does not respond at first. It never does. It allows silence to settle fully, as if silence itself is part of the answer.

For a long moment there is only exposed ground, stripped air, and the absence of movement pretending to be permanence.

Then the answer comes, not as sound, but as recognition already present in the shape of the place.

“You are not empty. You are displaced.”

The words do not fix anything. They do not solve what is unformed. But they shift where the weight sits.

Empty would mean loss without remainder. Displaced means presence without position. Something still intact, still here, but no longer aligned with the conditions that once held it in place.

The distinction is not comfort. It is orientation.

The fatigue remains. The uncertainty remains. The future does not become clearer.

But the pressure loosens just enough for breath to return without resistance.

You stay a little longer than you intended. Not because anything has been resolved, but because something no longer demands immediate resolution.

Eventually you stand.

The pond does not follow. It does not call you back. It simply remains as it always has, exposed and quiet, holding what it can no longer contain but still refuses to forget.

As you turn away, there is no transformation that announces itself. No clean ending that declares meaning complete.

Only the recognition that this place has held you in different forms before. And each time, something in you has been set back into alignment just enough to continue forward without collapse.

You walk away with nothing solved.

And still, the strange sense remains that something essential has been returned to its place, even if only for a while.

The pond stays behind, unchanged by your leaving.

And what it gave you was not answer.

Only the ability to stand again inside what has not yet ended.

— Gonzo

[Sighlass]

Heat of Summer can also hurt a pond that is too shallow to keep cool enough water to sustain fish life. A pond require maintenance of digging it out ever so often... Sediment collects and fills them in unfortunately, like an unmaintained pipe/water drainage system around the house.

The joy of having a pond with a "deep spot" to fish that only you know. The sadness of knowing a fishing hole will die because the owner (often due age) has grown beyond caring if it lives or dies.