It happens slowly. Every day I look at the pond on campus, and I can see the ice slowly conquering the entire expanse of water. It is a war that happens every winter, and every winter the ice wins. Like a virus, it starts from a single point somewhere on the pond and spreads. When it cannot spread any further out, the ice spreads up, reaching for the sky like tiny skyscrapers in a frozen city, all competing to be the tallest, competing to cover the most area. Soon the densely packed molecules will be so thick that the water underneath will cease to be visible.
The ice seems to creep too slowly to be observed, but I can see it invading new territory every day. It looks like concrete, not perfectly translucent like the cubes in your drink, but opaque and grayish-white like the cement on a newer patch of sidewalk (before too much oil, blood, and coffee have been spilled on it and have turned it a darker color). The strange thing about ice is that it is never static. Like a city, it is either prospering or it is in decline; there is no third option. With the expansion into new territory, the frost is guaranteed survival, but with every recession, every day that warmth recaptures some water, the ice is reminded of its unavoidable destiny come spring.
Some days, when I walk to class next to the pond, I can't help but break the ice, just to see the water underneath. I throw stones into the pond, and then I watch as the water bubbles up from below, giving it a brief release from its wintry prison. With every warm day, I am filled with hope that soon the frost will be gone, but it seems that until April the warmth never lasts, and the ice always recaptures any open water rescued by the heat of the sun.
Until spring comes, I must imagine what the open water looks like; I must imagine what the pond is like without the thick ice covering it.
It happens slowly. Every time I go home, I notice something new. Since I started college two and a half years ago, the once small business district in my hometown has grown exponentially. The last time that I was home there was not an AMC movie theater downtown. Two years ago there was not a trendy coffeehouse-style restaurant. There definitely was not a Kinko's copy shop. My hometown is being inundated by these cold buildings that spread themselves over all of the open land where I used to play as a child. I think that soon I won't be able to see anything but concrete in my hometown.
What happened? Whenever I go home I see something that has just been built: townhouses, apartments, movie theaters, restaurants. All of these buildings take months to construct, but to me, it seems as if they are developing overnight like frost on a patch of grass. The new office buildings downtown, their tops sharpened by antennae, look like upside-down icicles waiting for the temperature to warm so that they can melt into the sky. Cold, hard, and smooth, the steel reminds me of ice, but this is ice that will not melt, ice that human hands have formed.
I go to a small park on the outskirts of town. It feels as if I am on the shore of the pond at school only this pond is frozen over by concrete, and what the icy shell conceals within is land instead of water. I pick up a rock and hold it in my hand. It is not cold like the cement; it has a warmth that reminds me it is natural. I want to throw this rock. I want this rock to break through the concrete layer and liberate the land I so desperately want to see. I want to throw this rock like I would at the pond on campus. I want to see the explosion when the rock makes contact. I want to see the concrete break apart and scatter in all directions. I want to see what lies beneath. I want to destroy this icy cement that covers my town. I bring back my arm to throw this rock straight into the city.
I stop short.
I drop the rock at my side.
"Throwing rocks never solved anything," I think to myself.
This concrete that has spread across town like ice across a pond, this cold cement that hides magnificence beneath it, it's not going to break no matter how hard I throw this rock. At this moment, it hits me that cement and concrete, iron and steel, all the things that now make up my hometown have one thing that separates them from the ice that covers my campus pond: they will remain. This concrete ice that covers my hometown will not melt come spring. As I walk towards my house along the outskirts of town, I remember what my town used to look like, and I remember the places I used to play. Those places are mostly gone now, and they won't come back until the cold concrete is gone. When will the winds bring weather so warm that the cities will recede like ice on a pond, revealing the beauty underneath?
Until that day I must imagine what the open land looks like, I must imagine what my town looked like before it became covered in concrete and cement.