Playground

Chapter excerpt from an unfinished story in a life full of unfinished ideas

I have so many unfinished things in my life, I feel like I can never commit myself to anything fully. I’ve come to appreciate it, loving the things I create and do even in fragments. I can’t even bring myself to come up with an original post or story or anything for this blog I just created about two weeks ago (I guess my originality has a very small cap).

I keep stopping myself two sentences in to any idea I painfully manage to squeeze out because “it isn’t perfect.” Somehow, I predict that what I have to say won’t be valuable or worth continuing that early on (sometimes before I even touch my notebook or my keyboard).

Even for things as simple as cooking a meal for myself feel like I have a high bar to reach. I sat in my car outside of Trader Joe’s for at least 45 minutes trying to come up with what I wanted to cook (this was supposed to be fun, aren’t all things supposed to be fun?). I can talk about that more in another post now that I've gotten started on that idea.

In an effort to be less harsh on myself and not let my writing or this blog die this early on, I will share something that I have actually spent a lot of time perfecting that I wrote ages ago. It is the second chapter from my unfinished story/book, and I think it holds just as much value in a vacuum without any context.

Fun fact: I use [brackets] in my writing to note something is unfinished and I have to go back and change it eventually (using Ctrl + F). I don’t even have a name for the character, but that’s okay. Life is full of [brackets].

Next time, I will share an original thought, I promise. Enjoy this kind of long fragment if you still have the attention span! If you skimmed until this point, that’s okay too, and I love you for that. Or if you asked Chat-GPT to summarize my post, something is wrong with you (I wonder what it would tell you, if you try it, send it to me).

Playground

I could recognize where I found myself from the crunching of woodchips below my Sketchers and the fading, rusting hues of blue decorating the skyscraper-high monkey bars and dinosauric slides. The brisk air of a Midwestern morning, shielded by a marshmallow coat triple my size, told me I had finally survived multiplication tables and somehow made it to recess. This less-than-one-acre playground had always made the world seem a “gazillion” times more enormous; if you paused your game of tag for a second and looked past the school, further than your underdeveloped brain had ever allowed you to notice, you might appreciate the wave-like pattern the hills painted on the horizon, the transmission towers progressively shrinking in the distance along with the wires they carried in their mechanical arms, and the blinking red light atop a cellular tower playing peek-a-boo behind gray “cumulonimbuses.” The more I looked, the further the blocky school moved away, as if dragging itself further from my reach. Perhaps a gigantic snail had claimed the building as its shell and now slithered somewhere warmer—he has a long way to go. I wonder how much time is left for recess… I don’t want to go back and be yelled at by my professor anytime soon. Professor?

“[Name], is everything alright?” an ancient voice grounded with a gentle hand cautiously placed on my left shoulder. “You’ve been staring off into space for a good minute there; you didn’t even hear your friends calling out for you to play.” Images of astronauts, rocket ships, and rovers manifested then dimmed in a blink. I think I was on the moon before this.

A certain tickle in the inner depths of my head itched me that I recognized this person; in fact, I even knew them quite well. Despite this, another piece of me still needed confirmation on whether I remembered this stranger, if they truly were a part of my life. I turned only my head sideways as if the hand pinned the rest of my body down, forbidding me from turning entirely. It was a soothing gesture, after all, a pure type of touch that your grandmother might bless you with. It caught me particularly off guard, as if I hadn’t felt this sensation of care in years. Rapid flashes of memories covered my vision, teleporting me away from the vivid greens and the smell of lightly rusted metal. This meditation had converted and twisted the scenery as if I had cast some form of curse. Am I dying? Is this my life flashing before my eyes? Visions of first kisses and heartbreaks, laughter and crying, failed classes and graduations. Memories? Strange, I’m only ten years old, I thought to myself. The woodchips appeared below my soles again.

People kept calling my name out harmoniously, a choir of youthful voices filled with extrinsic aspiration desperately lullabying for my attention. The hand sank deeper into the once billowing layer of my winter coat, and I scanned the face behind me, realizing I had to look up to see it properly.

“Oh, sorry, Mrs. Nance, I was distracted,” I mumbled timidly in response to her, slowly moving my eyes to view her face. It was blurry, like when you couldn’t find the sweet spot for the antennas above those antique televisions. To my horror, out of her head sprouted these exact antennas pointed in opposite directions like horns. They moved with the air, affecting the resolution and pixelation of her face when they shifted. I shook my head, and they vanished, yet her face remained a puzzle.

Mrs. Nance (was that even her real name?) was my fourth-grade teacher, a sweet older lady who had always looked over me with memorable care. She checked in on me frequently—a borderline obnoxious amount—and egged me to make friends with my classmates. She always blubbered about how much she loved my bright red frames and the elastic band that held them firmly on my underdeveloped head (overdeveloped compared to the rest of my body). She had a recurring anecdote she would recount to me about her nephew who had lost his glasses on a rollercoaster during a “loopdey-loopdey-loop!” (she made sure to say that part in a shrieking attempt at a jingle, sort of sounding like if Toucan Sam inhaled a line of his iconic breakfast delight crushed up into a refined, colorful powder). Then, she would let out a Santa Claus-esque cackle, on some days blessing me by comically holding her belly and leaning backward just like he would in a Coca-Cola commercial. “If only he had that trusty little elastic of yours that day!” she would exclaim pompously to conclude her anecdote alongside a muffled giggle and then an innocuous smile. I rarely returned these exaggerated gestures, opting to stare back at her blankly and blink in acknowledgment. I may have been a child, but even then, I could piece together the motive behind her incessant adulation. It never made me like those glasses any more than I did. Yet in a way, and I really hate to admit this, it was oddly endearing. Eerie, no doubt, but Mrs. Nance and her bizarre episodes somehow became a comforting part of my routine. Although to her, I must have been nothing more than a blank expression. Her existence felt so far away, even with her hand on my shoulder.

My every breath continued to let out a visible, thick cloud of condensation, rising towards Mrs. Nance’s enigmatic face before dissipating around her. The warmth of my exhale made her wrinkles appear deeper. Her eyes had a faint glimmer, a sparkle that a supernova might project to a planet’s night sky millions of light-years away—the final gleam of a star, a tired shimmer of a past life, of vigor, soon to be gone just like my breath. If you stare intimately, directly into the eyes of the individual, long past the awkwardness and the burning urge to divert at all costs, you can bask in the warmth of this light, perhaps the life rising from their lungs to the pupils, or rather emanating from somewhere fathomless. As children, we never really grasp that look in grown-ups’ eyes. God, the universe, Buddha, whoever or whatever, please, let me stay here a little longer, unafraid, certain about everything yet truthfully naive. Childhood is a paradoxical state, a word I couldn’t even spell at this age if I tried. Pa-ra-dox-i-cal. I used to claim to hate everything about this place, crying to my parents about wanting to be older. Mom, I am too mature for snack times and recess, too smart and aware for tetherball and four-square. I am not a child, I would tell her. Then, I would stare at her eyes in frustration, watching that same kindle lose fuel as she looked at me; she would chuckle sarcastically and then smile. One of those smiles that says more than words, one where the eyes stay indifferent and no words have to be spoken. Let me stay here, please.

“Go join them, [Name], they miss you a lot,” whispered Mrs. Nance, her voice almost picked up and carried away by the sharp gusts of cold wind. She slowly took her hand away from my shoulder, crossed her arms, and moved her gaze to the top of the playset. I followed, seeing a group of classmates standing by the edge of the play-fortress, waving their hands in the air and calling my name. Most of them didn’t quite appear as I remembered. Others resembled soft shadows, a penumbral type of shade as if their figures stood between me and a warm, fulfilling sunset—one of those bittersweet sunsets that signal the end of a special day with an enduring gradient so vivid you could recreate it with a mere five brush strokes on a white canvas: a mix of sharp, tangy apricot; accompanied by royal yet rustic indigo, or an undistinguishable blue-purple; and garnished with shavings of fandango. Even so, I recognized them all. We are all friends here, of course. Inseparable, I couldn’t imagine a world where we were anything less.

Despite my shivering and the scarf my mom forced me to wear coiled around the lower half of my face, breathing felt effortless here. Smiling was an instinct. I guess it is time I rejoin them, I conceded, giving Mrs. Nance one last glance before I left her. Behind the mosaic overtaking her facial appearance—her visage seemingly sectioned proportionally into jigsaw-like pieces that shuffled continuously—I noticed her dissecting me thoroughly with her eyes. Perhaps not dissecting, since it lacked scrutiny and certainly any malintent, but instead admiring poignantly with a tinge of grief only visible in her weakened smile—the sole portion that remained somewhat static.

“You sure have grown a lot, [Name],” she began to tell me through a soft exhale. “I can barely recognize you anymore, your eyes are starting to look like mine.” She considered the implications of this statement, turning away to face my classmates who seemed further away than before. Her lips moved, but I was not meant to hear what she had murmured. As she turned back once more to watch over me, for what we both knew may be the final time, her face came together. She hid her stars behind shut eyelids. Had she not, the flares may have blinded me. I smiled. Then I chuckled. Soon enough, I began laughing as hard as she would, holding my stomach while tears froze as they escaped.

“Bye, Mrs. Nance!”

I didn’t look back. I couldn’t look. I sprinted towards the figures in the distance, swerving in zig zags with arms out like a plane. Yet, despite my youthfulness, my legs felt sluggish and heavy. The closer I felt that I moved toward the play fortress, the further away it appeared, as if it stood at the end of a tunnel. The world turned into slow motion, gradually pulling me to a halt. My classmates cheered and waved more intensely—they had a certain glow amidst the foggy day. The air felt colder than before. If I froze here for the rest of time, would it truly be so bad?