The Guardians

I thought I would post here a piece I'm working on for one of my writing classes. Environmental Writing, they call it, and the assignment has been for everyone in the class to choose a place in our environment on which to write personally, publicly, and professionally. (I shall not clutter the page with journalistic and research approaches I have taken in writing on this place; they are rather dull and uninteresting) But as it comes time to relax a bit and write from a purely personal standpoint, I suppose I didn't anticipate the place I chose to tug so much at my heart. I grew up playing at Sunset Park, as it was adjacent to my primary school, and have to come to realize through this class all the rich memories embedded there. It astounds me how much time has passed between school days and todays, and how swiftly it went, and how I'm writing about memories now. The writings, I might tell you, are highly fragmented. The older I get the more I remember about being a kid, and I liken the experience of writing from memory to a shattered piece of glass. Hm.. that sounds a bit morbid. It really is though - a collection of disjointed, sort of fragmentary articles that all fit together in one way or another. So although it feels incomplete, there is something about describing a single moment, one strange and familiar flashback, that is quite lovely.

The Guardians

One could nearly forget that she is walking through a grove of trees, when all about her are the wide and lofty trunks, bare of branches until so high up their immense and naked stems that she pays no attention to the sheltering canopy they bear. She might arch her back to see the green flats swaying in a windy rhythm above, might feel small beside the boles jutting out of the ground and bursting triumphantly into the sky, might try to wrap her arms around the belly of one, and find that she is indeed small. But the child pays no attention to the quiet onlookers. She is caught up in the hazy summer evening. Her August is fragrant and heavy, the air sizzling with sunset, and brown-winged bugs, and cotton. She comes alone to the park to play, hides behind the trees and inside her imagination. She pretends she is the only one who thought to come here tonight, and that the whole word has dissolved save this perfect place.

A slide awaits her in the distance - its blue and white poles spiraling upward to lean against the amber sky, and its sleek descent plummeting toward the ground. This is what she came here for. She has yet to conquer this one slide, and pretends that doing so will make her king. Then she will be ruler here, a monarch of the playground. She will make nations out of anthills and slaves out of pebbles. Even the trees that stand so straight and so still will bow down. The glorious thought abides in her head, and she proudly ascends the height of the thing. Her eyes are big and brown and beaming. The sides of the seat are like fire from the sun, the friction screeching as she pushes herself off. The launch snatches her breath, and she is propelled down the length of the slide, thrust forward over the lip at the bottom, surrendered to the sweet, warm mound of bark chips below. Her sandals are whipped from her feet. Her knees and knuckles dig into the ground. She bites down hard on her tongue, little head rushed with exhilaration and a raw sort of fear, an unexpected sort of fear. It happened fast, and she is not quite sure what to think. Where does it hurt? Am I going to bleed? Stifling tears and pushing her hair out of her face, the little girl rises from the ground and shakes the dangling bark chips from her dress and elbows. It doesn’t feel like kingship, or even like play. She glances about for someone that saw, to tell her not to cry the tears, a bosom to bury her face in. But these trees that see everything say nothing at all.