I want to go back to that moment. I was just a little girl, with shaggy brown hair I had cut myself. Walking barefoot down to the old smelly pond with a bucket and clear plastic cup. I was a forest fairy, I whispered to the flowers. Kissed the plants on their foreheads. Waved and nodded at the squirrels as if we were old friends. Sang and hummed with the bees and danced with the trees. I walked down these aged wooden steps that were soggy and sprouted with moss. I sat on the sandy bank and watched the catfish play. Swimming up and down the shallow tinted green shore. I took that plastic cup, walked into the murky water, ignoring the goopy seaweed smooshing beneath my feet. I stayed calm, and slowly maneuvered my body leading and inviting the baby catfish up to the shallow waters edge. Got down on all fours and pounced on the swarm of catfish, jolting my cup forward to snatch and capture. Plop, they would go one by one, into my old blue bucket. I made my own little ecosystem filled it with sand, algae, that murky water, and snails that clinged to their rocks. But I filled that bucket with maybe twenty baby catfish. Twenty. Baby. Catfish. I talked to them, sang them songs. I screamed up to the house for Mom to come look. Look at what I had accomplished. Look what’s in my old bucket. But nobody came. I sat there alone just looking at my little aquarium. Swishing my finger back and forth to see if any fish would nibble. I wanted to keep them. I wanted to show my Mom or my Dad, but no one was there to see. When the sun began to sink and the sky turned a shade of pinkish-orange, I dumped the bucket and said: “Be Free”. I was alone again. I always wondered why no one came down to see me, or called out my name. Or if they even knew where I was. I only had the forest because I was their fairy forest queen.