E.L.E. - Page 4

Wandering through the dirt playground, he spun the carousel wheel, a memory of dizzy glee and nausea. He rode one of the springy horses, and whooped like a cowboy. He tried the long metal slide, sticking to the surface until it should have been renamed a “scoot”. Finally, he just sat on the swing, moving back and forth lazily, looking at his feet. Nothing broke the silence except for the occasional sob or prayer carried on the wind.

“Is this seat taken?” asked a voice behind him.

Roy stopped swinging, and looked over his shoulder. In the ambient light of the arc lamps and spaceship lights stood a tall blond woman with a strange expression on her face, as if she was as surprised as he to find someone out here, alone. She was quite attractive, and his heart made a completely unfamiliar but not unwelcome squeeze that took his breath away.

“Well, I was saving it for nobody special, but then you showed up.” He wondered where that had come from. Must’ve seen it in a movie once, he thought.

She looked at him, stunned for a second, then suddenly smiled as she understood the compliment. It was the single most beautiful thing Roy had ever seen. He held out a swing to her.

“Roy,” he said.

She stepped forward. “Susan.”

“I’m not very good with people,” said Roy. “But I sure would enjoy the company.”

Susan sat in the swing and rocked opposite of Roy for a few moments. “I used to love looking at the moon,” Susan stated. She sounded angry.

“It’s been a long time since I just looked at the moon,” said Roy.”It’s been a long time since I took a good look at anything, really. And now, there’s only that,” he gestured upwards, “to look at.”

“No,” said Susan. “No regrets. Not now.” They swung in silence for a while longer. Sometime during the silence, Roy took Susan’s hand, and held it like a piece of onion paper, trying not to crumple it while making sure it didn’t get away. The contact warmed his hand, and then his heart, and he felt a sense of belonging that he’d forgotten existed. He smiled, guardedly at first, then broadly and openly. In that moment, he understood love. Not intimate love; the love of husbands and wives; the love of furtive glances and rushed couplings in backseats; not even the love of his sixth grade sweetheart, who left him for Tommy, the boy who had the Def Leppard patches on his denim jacket. No, the love he felt was bigger, it encompassed everything he saw, it was love for the dirt under his feet, no longer just something to walk on, but something to connect all others who walked on it; the people in the church he’d passed who no longer seemed so cloying and pathetic, but strong for recognizing the truth of what was being lost; this girl, Susan, who meant more to him at this moment than he could ever truly explain.