Park Slides

 

PARK SLIDES

There are fragments of your childhood memories that you never can associate into discrete boxes of time frames nor place them into a distinguished category of emotions, just a memory with more golden and white in the sky to make it seem unreal or almost like a made up memory. One of these would probably be running towards the swings in a park. Tiny feet slapping against a dewy and soft green floor as if any moment now could be a monumental. Where to? was probably what we were always trying to figure out. We'd like to think it was freedom and joy when it was just adulthood. Within moments we let go of our parents' hands. “Be careful” they call out, they stay back at their own pace and we move forward. Their eyes stick to our backs and our heads and the ground beneath us, looking out for dangers and being on their guard while we reach a slide. I remember climbing the stairs and my mom being hidden away from my sight as she moves towards the landing of the slide. A tiny struggle later an achievement would engulf me when I’d reach the top and from there, I'd look at my parents, waiting for me to come back to them only to let go again. At 20, when I come back home to find it quiet with my mom in the bedroom sleeping because she is tired of bearing the pain or when my dad wakes up in the middle of the night because he is unwell, I think to myself: this is me sliding off the slope and coming down into their arms. This is me returning to the hands that let me go to see the world better and fight for my place in it . This is me realizing that for a few hours I've been far away in my own pursuits of success and education when they have stayed where they always were: at the bottom of the slide, open arms, waiting for me. There are days when I would rather not admit it, but there are days when i want to tell them that ma, baba, I wouldn't have moved down the slide if I didn't know you were waiting for me, I would've been afraid, I would have been stranded because for a child these parents are his or her home. I want to sit by their sides and tell them that seeing them struggle is not easy, seeing them weak and unwell shatters a child’s delusion that parents are always there and can never be beaten, it irrefutably invokes the idea in a hopeful heart that things end, like that memory ends when I reach the slides landing, waiting for arms to embrace me. waiting.