Rocket Park

I can't remember the OG Medium Title

If I’m remembering correctly, on my 6th birthday we went to the Rocket Park. That’s not it’s real name, but a name that I gave it on account of the giant metal rocket in the center of the playground with an attached slide. Over and over, I climbed to the top and then shot out of the hulking thing. The most fun was sliding down on my stomach. My arms outstretched. The ground rushing at my face and that skidding stop just before I tumbled off the end.

There is something about the brisk air on my face, and my brother trying to coerce me to go on the merry-go-round. That’s the thing with an Autumn birthday. It’s often one of the last clear days of the year, so up I went in the rocket again and again, my breath curling in wisps, my legs burning. Staving off the inevitable disappointment when a parent hollered out that it was time to go home.

But you know what’s strange? I have no idea the real name of that park. Only that it was a few towns over and not a place we could go to with any regularity. I don’t even remember how I learned of it in the first place, only that it was always at the top of my list. That the handful of times we went, it was always fun.

My enduring appreciation of architecture has led me to see some incredible feats of engineering like the Eiffel Tower and Hagia Sofia and Mont St. Michel. You might be somewhat disappointed to learn that none of them have a slide. I know I was.

But rest assured that I ran full tilt toward them anyway. Into the fray of adventure and discovery, and, because I turned out to be rather academic later in life, into the nerdiness of the diagrams and maps and historical factoids. The placards and brochures. I read them all with the wind on my face.

And yet, I have to admit to you that there was a good stretch of time in there, a few decades really, where I didn’t do that at all. Where I’d stopped chasing the rush of an earthward descent. Quit running until my legs burned. Withdrew my desire for the things I loved, and dialed down my volume because no one around me wanted to hear my song anyway.

Then, slowly, I turned away from asking, and pleading, and begging for the bare minimum birthday party in a playground two towns over. I forgot all about the Rocket Park.

There’s no easy way to look at that, or to revisit the aching disappointment that permeated those years. The ones that six-year old me will never see because she’s still six and will always be. There’s something so fragile about that year, six, and somehow also magnificent.

Oh, but those in-between years. Lesson upon lesson. Half the time, I want to revisit the star chart to see what kind of fuckery was afoot in the heavens, and what I was supposed to learn from it all. Aside from how callous and narrow-minded and selfish people can be. How the shocking sting of that reality hit harder than a drop off the end of a metal slide at full speed.

I should at least tell you about the good ones. The people full of hope and generosity, and how easy they are in their own skin. The ones who’ve reminded me of how deeply my brittle yet unflagging optimism remained embedded into my soul. How they’ve always shown up just in time. And they’ve done it with such consistency that I’ve began to believe again in the power of wanting something. If for no other reason than to fly out of the side of my own brand of metal rocket.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I was surrounded for years by small people who ground me down to the point where I could hardly see six-year old me. And in the dusting off, I learned that I’d never throttled down on life. Not for a second. I still show up at the finish line, cheering until I’m hoarse.

I’m running. Legs burning. Breath curling white. As fast as I can to get back to that truer version of myself, because she had it right all along.

Despite my single-minded focus on that goddamned park, the way I gave zero shits about anyone else’s opinion of that playground, and my naïveté about the enduring presence of monkey bar blisters. They’ll heal in time.

It all will.