Reflection Blog

I arrived in the back of the dingy CVS, walking past the McDonalds and the Nail Spa and Waxing Salon. The stench of the area rolled over me as I glanced around across the five or so dumpsters lined up behind the building. I looked over as it immediately caught my eye. The disgusting swirling mess of a puddle sunk into a pothole in the parking lot. The oil haphazardly dispersed throughout the water. There it sat, reflecting the blue above in its twisting, churning mirror, as if mocking the sky for its peace. To either side of the puddle sat mounds of dirt and trash, the mountains to the ocean of oil. A truly depressing site, it stood as a reminder that even the smallest expressions of nature could not escape the pollution of man. True to our goal, we kept looking around the parking lot, but my mind stayed with the puddle. I could not escape its reflection, a contorted reality swirled together with petroleum and small pebbles. The more I saw, the more its reflection felt true. We were living in the reflection, a dark world polluted by the interfering hand of humanity, and muddled into an unrecognizable blob.

As I stared down into the puddle however, its strange beauty crept over me. The purple silver swirl of the oil mixed with the dark stormy water created a sort of dark beauty; a direct contrast to the emotions I was feeling. As wrong as this felt, it had a certain appropriateness in my moment. There was something so human about it, the creation of something appealing, at the cost of the nature around us. I could not draw my eyes away as the mesmerizing swirl kept turning, a tornado of human destruction. Quickly however, I got distracted. Forcing its way into my vision, blocking out the sky was a truck of some sort. Was it always there? Or did it sneak in while I was focussed on the reflection before me. As I stared into the reflection of the truck, it seemed to grow in size before me, a very human intrusion, breaking me away from my puddle, and all the ways it pulled me in.