Sitting on the bench,
trying to open my constricted self
to the park’s fresh air and sunshine,
I watch the playground antics of children.
They are learning, I think,
how to be loved.
A mother scoops up her daughter,
their giggles drifting by on the breeze.
I sigh, and wonder
what that childhood
might have been like.
The lessons of my upbringing
were all about survival.
Being noticed held dangers,
so I learned
to make myself
small.
I learned
to create
a face
they would not hate.
I learned
to take everything that is
truly me
and hide it deep,
deep,
deep
in shadow.
For it was,
back then,
all about them –
what they wanted,
what they needed,
what they demanded –
and my endurance.
So I sit here on the bench
in the sunshine
with myself
which is,
in reality,
not my self at all
but only a safe façade.
And I
want to find
what I had to hide
all those years ago.
I am no longer small,
and they are far away.
But I am finding it hard,
to uncover those true pieces,
so successfully hidden.
Here on the bench,
I glimpse glimmers of magic,
feel a joyful essence brushing by;
both elusive.
I watch the laughing children,
learning to be loved
and think
perhaps
in the end,
it is not
only
about survival.
