Don't Get Too Comfortable
A lingering smell permeates the room, a distinct mixture of cheap disinfectant over the subtle undertones of sweat and fake fruity scents. Perfumes for preteens, build-a-bear add-ons, scratch and sniff stickers that have been scratched and sniffed countless times by countless nails and noses. Fake. The pillars of the scaffolding playscape seem to stretch overhead, blanketing you from the soft yet inviting fluorescent lights above you. It's a dream. It's a fantasy. It's just the perfect place.
You have spent your fair share of time in this room. Every slide has been climbed up and spiraled down, every block has been stacked and overturned. You've cartwheeled and somersaulted and swam in the ballpit for longer than your small brain can fathom. All that's left to do now is rest, you think while laying horizontal against your mother.
"Don't get too comfortable," your mom tells you. Your head has barely hit her fuzzy green cardigan, the wool has not yet covered your eyes as you lay on the bench next to her, but still she stresses- "We need to get home in time to work on your reading log." you nod and close your eyes, tugging her sleeve closer.. ready to wind down a bit after a long afternoon of play. You're fading off into dreamland once more, ready to be carried off to the car like royalty
When you suddenly wake up.
Mom and her fuzzy green cardigan are nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be grasped. The bench you lay on, before feeling like a soft squeaky polyester.. Now torn and sinking, wooden frame underneath resonating and resisting your head's gentle nestling. This is not the place you recognize. This is not the space you were taken to. You sit up.
The foam consolidating most of the room has crumpled and torn, exposing the rusty metal tubing and drywall surrounding you. Pieces of rubber and scraps of faux leather litter the ground under thick layers of grime and dust. The dust is everywhere, particles streaming and floating through the air illuminated by one of the few dim fluorescents still buzzing on. The work done on this room isn't vandalism, for the most part it isn't even man-made. It's just reclamation. Rightful reclamation? Or merely justifiable?
Your heart carries a weight you haven't recognized before this moment.
Chipped painted handprints underneath the slide marked by some amateur, minor graffiti artist long ago call to you. You walk over and press against them.
Your own hands are bigger, longer. They overshadow both the ones plastered on the slide, but the memory of your hands as well. They weren't this stiff, this cracked, this textured. They hadn't seen such experience. You hadn't seen such experience. You trace the signature with your index finger, sloppy lettering marking "NICKY".
You hope Nicholas is doing well.
Every visitor of this room, the lively spirits that once encircled these plastic pits and foam piles are now gone. Not dead, not missing, just gone. Never to return. You are the sole excursionist, and most definitely the last.
You tuck yourself further under the slide and try to think about how you got here.
How did you end up in this place?
Mom drove me here after school.
What school?
School, My school. The school I go to.
Drove, What kind of car?
A blue car. Mom's car. The one with the big doors and dark windows.
Mom drove you? What's her name?
Mom. Mommy when I was younger. My mom.
How did you end up in this place?
This weathered room was once a space of joy, of innocent memories. Memories you lived only minutes before, flash frozen and thawed out seemingly decades later. You have no memory of the time passing, only of the polyester couch and her fuzzy green cardigan and the faint smell of cheap disinfectant. The fake fruits. The fluorescents that have long since died. You want to bang your monstrous fists against the slide, against the playscape, against the faded walls. A futile act, but it could draw some feeling of control from within you..? No. You don't want to feel any responsibility for the destruction this room has undergone.
Part of you wants to take comfort in the natural elements. The dirt and grime, while initially viscerally unpleasing, may one day foster life and growth for some future development of a budding plant, maybe a flower garden blooming in an unlikely space.
This too, is a futile gesture. Those imaginary flowers are a long way off. Sunshine doesn't stream into this room, there are no windows. It's just you in the dark, and pretty soon it'll just be dark. You just need to leave, but how?
You exit the slide's hideout, brushing off the dust coating your hair, and begin moving for the entrance. Are you even ready to leave? Wanting to go down one of the slides one last time, even if just to defer facing whatever waits for you in the outside world? Braving the debris for one last soiree?
You push on, stepping over plastic balls and broken glass and discarded stuffed toys nearly disemboweled due to age. Freedom is within your grasp. Something is within your grasp at least. You reach the shuttered door marked EXIT, the door with the grimy sticker residue coating it. The door that holds the answers, holds your confrontation. The door you need to just will yourself to... open...
The door opens. You're hit with a blinding light, instinctively covering your eyes and softly murmuring out with a hushed cry of confusion. Hrnnn-?
"Rise and shine, nicky. Looks like you needed your beauty sleep, your hair is a mess.. Did you have a good time at the center today?"
The debris, dust and destruction, the dirt and grime, the eventual inevitable fate of the play center..it all fades from your mind like wet footprints on the concrete and brick next to a pool, evaporating in the sun as you unbuckle the seatbelt and climb out of the blue car.
"I did."
image credit: birminghammail.co.uk