The Loch Ness Monster

This was Google's animation for today. It's 2015 and people are still looking for Nessie. She has her own official website, her own urban legend, and now her own Google doodle in honor of the first alleged photograph of the creature.

Nessie was my life when I was in the second grade. I remember looking at a book on the subject while standing in line for mandatory eyesight and hearing testing in the library of my elementary school: a grainy photograph edged in the deep brick red of the rest of the cover. I researched plesiosaurs, listened to a song about plesiosaurs, watched documentaries about creatures of the deep sea, flipped through books on paleontology, and resolved to be an oceanographer. I had daydreams of a small house on the water, equipped with a glass staircase where I would go down to spend time with my friends. I was going to find the Loch Ness Monster.

I was a bored and lonely child, and it's my theory that lonely people crave lonely spaces. The single lake, the mountains, the mist, the snow, the forest, the gray sky. There's something validating about all of that, something harmonious that comes about between the space and the human spirit. I would hide in closets and in my bed, spend recess by myself on the steps, swing alone in the yard away from my brother and sister. It was the same principle. It still is, I suppose. And there is something unique about water, something sorrowful. At the depth of my depression I dreamed of drowning.

#suicide #Nessie #monsters #urbanlegends