Things Buried

 Maybe if I stand in one place, staring at the same spot, the world will just slowly melt away like the wicked witch of the west. I start with the ceiling of my bedroom, moving down to the walls, to the floor, to the halls. They never change, though they waver in my blurred vision.

“I’ll be back at nine, Sam. Are you okay being alone?” My mother calls from the hall. She asks this question every day; though we both know my answer won’t change a thing.

“Yea, mom, I’m good.” I answer just like the past 275 days since she got this job.

            Honestly, I’m fine being alone, used to it, prefer it even. So I sit in my room on my striped pink bed spread repeating the process of making things disappear. I start with the ceiling wall again and end with the hall.

            That’s when I get the text. It’s from a girl that I used to know, a girl I no longer know. I haven’t spoken to her in exactly one year. I know because I have counted the days.

            Come to the playground at sunset.

My throat is dry and it becomes hard to breathe. She doesn’t need to tell me which playground to go to. I know it’s the one behind the elementary school. The one they can’t decide if it’s worth the money to tear down since no one has used it in five years. 

I take my time walking to the playground, unprepared for the events that I know will unfold when I get there. The area is bathed in the fading glow of sunlight, making me feel like I’m walking in a dream. Raven’s pin-straight black hair blows in the wind, forming a dark halo like a haunted angel. Her mascara runs dark black lines down her face, wiping it free of makeup, and revealing pale skin a shade lighter. She looks ten years younger when she sits like this, her blue eyes staring off at the empty playground, arms hugged around her knobby knees. In this moment I’m reminded of just how different we are in appearance, in everything, and how it never seemed to matter.

I sit next to her on the muddy ground, more dirt than it is grass, as it has always been. I feel the coldness of mud seeping through my jeans, but I don’t care. For a moment it’s just silence. Not the kind of silence where there is nothing to say, but the kind of silence where there is so much to say that the chaos inside your head forms incoherent words that render your tongue useless.

It’s not the first time I wished that we could go back in time, instead of sitting here on a playground we came to when we were little, suffocating in stifling silence, chasing phantoms of our past as they run in circles around our heads. The people we used to be are gone now, ghosts, this playground the grave that buries them.

I can’t remember when this place lost its magic and died just like Christmas when you find out Santa isn’t real. I wonder if that’s how Raven sees it, but I never know what goes through her head. In truth I’ve always been afraid to ask.

So we sit here in the silence that speaks the words we can’t form, we watch the wind push the swings, and listen to the squeak it makes as it moves back and forth, back and forth. I wonder if it means to mock us, the way it seems to be, but in the end it doesn’t matter.

I look over at Raven and every bit of pain I see on her face I want to wipe away, just for a moment, a brief second of relief, knowing it will never last.  For a second I pretend that I didn’t once know this girl better than I know my own reflection. I pretend that I don’t know the exact reason I haven’t spoken a word to her since last year. And since I’m in the mood for denial, already knowing that tonight I’ll have to face some of the demons that live in this playground, I pretend that we are just two girls sitting in the desolate playground.