I look
around the classroom and I see the masks of my peers, equals in the bondage of
maturity. I think I can also see who they were, as the days of memory
accumulate like the birth of another person with the same soul. Forms change
without awareness. Not new, but not the same, either. Only the pinpoint between
the temples maintains the muster-sheet of identity. Call the roll now.
There are
six-year-olds playing peek-a-boo among the desks. Chasing that big red ball of
time down the hall. Bouncing, bouncing, and bouncing into the unknowable. Running
and shouting and laughing for the joy of innocence in the fog-fenced
playground.
Twelve,
and pulling the string of a kite across an open field. Friends run alongside,
either real or fairytale. The kite rising into the summer clouds like a phoenix
not yet reborn. Unburned. Unimpaired by experience. Free to hang in the sky
like a fool.
Then, the
teens who flirt and beg. Social animals without an instruction manual. Hormones
stalking prey, objects of feral lust, driven by hunger that can’t be named. Denied
satiation by fear of failure, most took the directions they were given and
followed the safe road to the final game. The others, so many others, found
other paths. Some escaped into closet worlds to play new games. Not all the
ways led out of the nightmares.
The final
game crept in and pounced like an invisible tiger, chasing them from the comforting
radiance of their only known world. What dark future waited? No light to guide
them except what they could build out of moss, scraps of dry twigs, and a
bonfire of cash. Dressed in the clothes of acceptability, they learned to cover
their faces with virtue and work ethic and financial responsibility. Thus they
arrived to this singular step on the stairway of life.
I see their
masks of now, but I imagine other selves slipping out to disturb the readers
who pretend not to see and smile at the antics between paragraphs.
Innocence
is never lost, simply buried under the accretion of suffering. There are still
games to be played, and the freedom to be foolish waits only for the unmasking.
All the people that we were still live within. Every day adds to the crowd. Too
many now to sort.
But, if I
could just return to that six-year-old… That pure child. Just a day from that one
day. It would be as though the massive pile of time were washed away like a
sandcastle battered by the tide. Rediscovering that moment of innocence might
be the medicine that makes the remainder bearable.
