I’d never been to a playground at night. To me, the slides and monkey bars looked normal glimmering in the daylight and burning with the heat of high afternoon, but as the moon slowly settled in the sky, the yellow and blue equipment protruded through the darkness. It seemed weird, like some alternate universe where kindergartners belonged in horror movies; however, here I was, seventeen, sitting on a swing in the cold of night, an abyss of black above me like ink. Next to me, Miriam’s swing rocked rhythmically, and a big university sweatshirt shielded her from the frosty air. October had just faded past us, obvious from the tornado of dead leaves waltzing in the wind.  

“Remember when we fought over Nick Rogers under the slides in first grade? And you threw mulch at me and got in trouble?” Miriam asked, facing the mounds of dirt underneath yellow slides. As I fixed my eyes on the equipment, the memory zipped past my mind, leaving remnants of wearing my hair in tight pigtails and running around in light-up sneakers and pressing mulch inside my fist. I thought of Nick Rogers now; though he still had the flaming red hair that I spent hours in my diary writing about, he was recently just expelled from our high school for using drugs in the bathroom. Maybe he recalled this playground too, wherever he was; the thought of two girls huddled in the basketball courts with hearts in their eyes must have been hard to forget. Those days, I reminded myself, were long gone, but at least the slide remained. 

I nodded and began swinging in attempt to feel a head rush, just like I used to do in third grade. As I ascended into the air, my stomach turned. For a second, I could nearly taste the mist of the clouds as their ever-changing shapes pulled away from me, spinning freely. Everything sped by in blurred stroboscopic movement, and as the night swirled, Miriam and I were suddenly six again. We were teasing our crushes and playing tag and pulling each other’s hair, letting go of being seventeen because at the time, we didn’t have to hold on to it.