The last few weeks of school before summer vacation often played confusing games with my mind. As much as I wanted out, as much as I wanted the drudgery and worry and strain of school to be done, June also made me want to slow things down. Faced with the prospect of freedom, suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. There were spells of enchantment in every school year, and friends who made their mark in my life. All of us had gone through the same trauma and drama in ways that bound us to each other like no one would again. That tender part of one’s life, those formative and impressionable years – I sensed then that they might not ever be repeated, and every June I felt them slip further away.
I’m a high school loverAnd you’re my favorite flavorLove is all, all my soulYou’re my playground love
Our playgrounds shifted and changed, from the other-worldly, gaudily-painted steel flowers and caterpillars and mushrooms of kindergarten, to the wooden climbing houses and shadowy covered slides, to the almost-adult tracks and courts of high school, just as our play moved from the outside world to the inside of our heads.
Through those high school corridors, my mind travels back into the past. The hallways feel dimmer in my head than they looked the last time I was in the building. Hazier and more dangerous too, filled with the people who tormented my mind more than they ever troubled me in person, the way most demons wreak their havoc – lazily relying on you to fill in the frightening blanks. And I would always give them more ferocity and power than they ever really held.
Yet my hands are shakingI feel my body remainsTime’s no matter, I’m on fireOn the playground, love
Though I could not see it or fully feel it at the time – there was only a vague sense of it – I held my own power too. It was there in the way most teachers appreciated my rapt attention to their every word, there in the compliments garnered from my outfits, there in the gaze of a guy who watched me change in the locker room for gym class, his eyes glued to me no matter how long I waited for him to leave before hastily pulling off my khakis and slipping into sweat pants. Power operated on all planes and playgrounds – we each had some, and we each used it in different ways. We were just starting to see, to learn, to play…
You’re the piece of goldThat flashes on my soulExtra time, on the groundYou’re my playground love
Anytime, anywayYou’re my playground love…
{Hear more coquette music here.}
Back to Blog
