I watch my toes streak against the sky. It has been months, maybe a year, since I’ve been on a swing.

Fenced Fire

There are two people in this quiet playground under the age of twenty. A grandmother is teaching a very small boy the ways of slides. He, supremely unimpressed, busies himself staring at the sand that clings to the slippery metal. Finally, he reaches out tentatively to touch the grains and they stick to his chubby fingers. A girl, about knee high, skirts in front me and my swing. I carefully, quickly tuck in my feet and she, face upturned and eyes open wide, makes it by safely. She pulls herself onto the swing on the other end of the bar.

“How about that swing?” suggests her mother. I can hear her point.
“The baby swing?” Incredulous.
“Yes, the baby swing.” Softly laughing and defeated, her mother helps her up and the girl is swinging.

The children come and go. It’s the older ones who stay. A picnic on the green. A boy in a white shirt and tie dashes for his car, girlfriend in tow, but it’s already been ticketed and the establishment will not be swayed. Frisbee in the ring: three boys and one girl with red dreadlocks. It’s the kind of red that we invent: not tulip red, not crayon red, not fire hydrant red, but a deep, shining, bright red. Someone imagined it one day, went to work one day and said there is a red I know, bright and deep, let me show it to you. That’s what she’s wearing in her dreads: her hair is saturated in someone else’s imagination.

I concentrate on making my downsweep smoother. My knees bending back send slight shudders through my body; I want the motion to be fluid. On the bar across, her back to me, another girl, also alone, is also swinging. She wasn’t when I arrived. It’s only now she picks up her feet and pushes off and now she is pushing hard into the air and her body jerks back when she pulls away from her heights.

Eventually I get off, too. I dig my toes into the earth, shake the grains out of my shoes, dust myself off and leave.

Because I am unfinished and spindle-shaped
I had an understanding with needles
and then they were threading me
and never have finished.
- “One” by Pablo Neruda

*

Today on the bus I saw a man with white hair and a cane, parchment skin and quivering hands give his seat to a woman with a carriage. She refused. He sat back down and didn’t look up again the entire ride.

On the subway, I saw another man, this one with less hair but all of it white, peering closely at a sheaf of papers explaining quadratic equations. He sat on the very edge of his seat, knees and photocopies jutting out into the jam of people, the greek and the arabic inches from his face.

*

I’m never alone, really.