Strings
When I try to simulate my childhood, I conjure images of all 10 of my fingers locked in a solo game of cat’s cradle, fully immersed in a bank-laser-trap challenge except it’s just a tied circle of soft yarn and my own tiny serious hands. I see the fast, repetitive, meditative loop-and-pull of friendship bracelets made from handpicked colored thread. I see those mesh bags that carried all your beach toys and the nets of your soccer games and the dandelions you picked on the opposite side of the field because yes technically you were playing defense but spiritually you were a dreamer and an artist and somehow also athletic, like you absolutely loved to run and feel the wind in your hair and Bend It Like Beckham but when you kicked that ball you were not, per se, focused on where it was going. You mostly wanted to unleash all of your hidden rage and set loose a Wimbledon-sized grunt as you pelted that stitched-up little sphere across the green wild fields beyond. And everything, everywhere, all the time is this beautiful web of threads leading back to sunsets you didn’t know were sacred yet. Stand-up-pedalin’ your bike home for Domino’s stuffed crust or Pizza Pockets or Bagel Bites and Nick at Nite and a new episode of All That! and Are You Afraid of the Dark? and realizing now that all those lil moments were sewn together like Cinderella’s mother’s dress into an entire childhood you didn’t even know you were wearing until one day it got stuck on yah shoulders. You tossed it on the top shelf of your closet along with shoeboxes of old class-passed notes, the ones you and your friends origamied into those little split-mouth Pac-Man squares or the diagonal fold with the tiny “pull me” flap, and anyway when you decide you’d like to try on that outdated beauty again for the nostalgia of it all, you’re just standing there holding it in your 10 fingers like how did this get so tattered and frayed? Where did the time go?
That was childhood’s magic trick. The spacetime suspension. The way every fleeting second could stretch, unravel, detangle into a whole. damn. week. The way the entire world opened before you like a dandelion-speckled soccer field and you ran and ran and ran some more, screaming come out come out wherever you are or Red Rover Red Rover because you never thought you’d run out of steam or heart or dreams or string. You thought this sweet moment right here was a circular loopsie of softness when really it was already the end of the line.
And now sometimes you forget how the wind flew in your bike-hair or the way it carried the ice-cream-truck song because now you’re inside a concrete box under buzzing lights writing copy that converts, which is an act so bleak that 12-year-old you would’ve assumed it was a prison sentence, and my god she thought life’s wonder was up ahead somewhere yonder, sweet angel. Turns out it’s behind us now — still stitched into us, though. Just gotta take some scissors to it and make a cape or somethin’.
