Passing through

Every time I pass the window in my living room back home, I peer out onto the playground of the elementary school across the street. I am reminded of the nights when my friends and I claimed that playground and made it our own.\nOn weekend nights in high school, a group of my friends would assemble at my house and trespass through my neighbor’s yard to the wire fence that surrounds the school. We would climb the fence and hop over, a dangerous act that often resulted in torn clothing or flesh.\nOnce there, we competed on the swings to see who could go the highest. We sat in the tower of the tallest slide and shared what seemed to us very noble observations about what little we knew of life. We made up games that gave us excuses to touch each other because our hormones were raging to extremes.\nWe were too young to have anywhere to go but just old enough for the desire for adventure and meaning to be ripe. We were falling in love with the night time and with feeling connected and with each other. We were falling in love with being young just in time to enjoy it before youth got ripped away from us.\nWe felt like the only ones in the world.\nMy parents didn’t understand. They asked, “Aren’t you too old to hang out at a playground?” But parents never understood anything. That’s why we held so tight to our friends.\nOur high was bound to fade. As school progressed, friends began turning instead to drugs or sex or hiding themselves behind schoolwork. Couples within the group broke up and disassociated themselves as a way to forget. Girls got catty, guys became too cool. We were broken up by the same forces that ultimately disband every transitory group of teenagers. We shared nights that made us feel invincible, but we never really were.\nAs it turns out, there were no compelling similarities holding us together. We all just happened to be experiencing the same emotions of growing up at the same place and the same time.\nI was mistaken in feeling that the playground would somehow always be ours, or that to the outside looking in we were anything more than bored adolescents passing through as inevitably as nighttime itself.\nIn recent visits home I have looked out my window and seen distant figures of teenagers on that playground. It has filled me with the urge to go outside, jump the fence and join old friends.\nStrangely, it has only recently occurred to me that if I were to do this I would not find old friends but people whom I do not know. The playground now probably belongs to another group of kids entirely.\nThese teenagers, whoever they are, are not the first and will not be the last. But as they are passing through, I hope so much that, at least for a little while, they too get to feel like they’re the only ones.