sitting on the swings alone
A Note: In June, I am teaching a virtual class on writing loss—Hauling An Ocean In: Voicing Grief. If you would like to learn with me or see what texts I’ll be teaching, you can register and learn more here.
I lived across from a small playground until I was about eleven years old. A swath of green grass around a neat rectangle of red dust and loose rocks. A blue slide and pale blue IMP swing seats attached to thick metal chains. A dark brown slide-and-climb structure underneath which me and my sister and the girl who lived next door buried a tin Crayon box filled with our special: silver chain, neon pony beads, golden locket. The girl next door told us, while we sat beneath the slide-and-climb, rain dripping at the edges of the metal platform, that she saw a man on top of her mother in bed the other night. He had hair between his butt. We all cringed. Shovelled more dirt onto the Crayon tin. We were about eight. When I left the playground, I understood that by telling us about the man and her mother, the girl next door had revealed a question that lived in a part of the world I did not yet know.
A few years later, when I was ten, the playground would reveal another question. This time, I was alone. I liked to sit on the soft, bendable blue of the swing and push off: pump my legs as far into the sky as I could, until the chains were going slack in the air and the seat was jumping. That day was overcast, clouds low and gray but no rain. A pack of five boys, maybe twelve years old, now that I think about it, cycled by, cutting across the grass of the park, weaving around the evergreens that grew in the middle, a thick stand of bristling pine. The bicycles cut dark grooves into the tender grass and I wondered if there wasn’t another way around. The boys cycled one behind the other in a neat, writhing row. Eventually, the row disappeared down the gravel alley that bordered the north part of the playground. I continued to swing into the overhead. Even still, when I think about being young, I can feel the rush of swings. The illusion of weightlessness.
When the pack of boys returned they were kitted up with water guns: some fancier than others, one in particular capable of producing a long, intense jet of water that immediately soaked my hair. I was in shorts and a t-shirt. The pack of boys made a ring around the swing, neatly out of the radius of the swing’s trajectory but encircling it. None of them left their bicycles, all of them sitting on their bike seats, their feet dug into the red dirt, water guns aimed upward and at me.
I kept swinging my legs as hard as I could through the streams of water which were cold and sudden on my legs and stomach. I never looked at any of the boys, only ever upward at the gray, flat sky which was somehow still too bright to look at for long. When the guns sputtered dry, the boys bicycled away. If any of them spoke, I don’t remember. As it is to my mind, all of us were silent.
What happened to you?
My mother asked me when I returned home, my shorts and t-shirt wet, my hair damp and dripping at the ends. I told her the barest sketch of the moment because I had come to understand something that I was still too young to know the language for.
I could not find a way to tell my mother that once the boys were gone, I had slowed my legs, let the pendulum of the swing gently ease until I could catch my feet in the dirt, drag them through the gravel and come to a stop. I had sat there for a moment, totally transfixed by the water swirling into dust and making an almost iridescent red clay. It was one of the first moments in my life that I would realize that for some, the sight of someone alone is a question.
I loved this , 💞
…and it got me thinking of so many ‘alone ‘ experiences …too many to number. , and some of them were times of being among a number of people! We can have the alone experience in a crowded room …inner fear goes hand in hand with ‘alone’. I believe it will shadows us until our last breath .
This is not the most profound thing to say, and I know they, too, were only children, but I want to go back in time and scare the living daylights out of those boys with a crowbar. I just want to reassure everyone that this is really something I would ever really do. It’s just what came to mind first.