By Jessica Mendlik

…when I was leaning over the edge of your grandparents’ dock, trying to get one last glimpse of Whiteface Mountain, I felt the wood beneath me creak and I slipped into that big pond. As water rushed into my nose and stung my eyes, all I could think about was how awful I felt for falling in. The MINI Cooper was packed with my stuff inconveniently at the bottom, your Nana’s hardwood floors were freshly vacuumed and the laundry neatly folded, and I was on the lake’s floor trying to figure out how I would explain myself.

Part of me wanted to stay underneath the water and not face the explosion I had already braced for. I believed it would have been much easier to let the seaweed grasping at my feet take hold than face the flogging from your family. I wouldn’t blame them. Instead of getting in the car like a sensible person in a rush would, I told you and your mom that I had to take one last look at Fern Lake. I did not mean to say goodbye from the bottom of it. Now this will be the lasting impression I have on your family: the new girlfriend who threw off the schedule and ruined Nana’s clean bathroom.

If I really did bury myself in the lake, if I really did keep myself from facing what I thought was on the surface, I fear what my parents would have done to you. They would have found a way to blame you, the man their daughter insists she is going to marry, for my disappearance. Or would my parents have sensed that I was hiding? Would they have known that I messed up? That I was avoiding my punishment? They would have driven the one-thousand-mile drive up to New York just to drag me out of Fern Lake and flog me instead. I clawed my way to the surface, absolutely mortified of the soaking wet burden I was.

I clung to the wooden planks and pulled my waterlogged-self back onto the dock. As I sat in my soggy clothes, trying to decide if I could fix my bangs before we left, I watched your mom stroll down the hill to get me. I was terrified. I felt naked, even though I could feel every thread and piece of my clothing sticking to me. I couldn’t stop the shame that churned inside me. Water pooled at my feet. “I fell in” was all I was able to muster.

What I didn’t tell you was that when your mom wrapped her arms around my cold, wet body, looking at the lake with me one last time, telling me it was okay to miss this place, telling me that it was okay that I fell in, I wanted to cry. I wanted to fall apart, splinter and break and sink into the lake with your mom holding me, like the dock holding us. I wanted to rest in the calmness of this water. And after I would be done rotting at the bottom, letting the northern pike nibble away at me, I wanted your mom to put me back together again. I wanted her to take out every screw and nail of shame and guilt I ever had out of me.

But I stayed silent as we sat on the dock together. It would have been too much to replace those bent up nails anyway. I felt guilty for even thinking I wished that.

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Jessica Mendlik holds a BFA in Creative Writing and a Publishing Certificate from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She has previously been published three times in The Atlantis: A Creative Magazine. A self-proclaimed Romantic, her writing often focuses on the human experience in nature, whether it be about the tides or the mountains or a field in between.