I can still hear the metal clang, feel the chains wobble and my hips ache.
The aftermath is what I call it: trauma, whiplash.
But not to her.
To her, it was everything.
She didn’t like her life; the bullying, teasing, feeling so out of place, trapped, and useless.
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She was under the impression that if she pumped her legs hard enough on the swing, she’d grow up faster and leave all the pain behind.
What she didn’t realize was that the higher you went on the swing, the further away the chains were from the swing set; the clangs became echoes. The park, the play structures, the laughter of children, and the messy grains of sand all became silent.
The higher she went, all she could see was blue and fluff that resembled clouds. She was so close that her hands didn’t just go through them; she could hear her hands fade through them like soapy hands full of dish soap.
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She couldn’t even see herself anymore as the child she once was was left behind without a trace, without a sound.
She once wanted that, but now she was stuck with an older version of herself that had seen so much more. This time, the child was trapped deep down.
In that moment between sky and earth, she forgot what it felt like to be small. She forgot the sting of woodchips in her knees, the sour-sweet taste of freezies on humid afternoons, the way her hair used to stick to the back of her neck when she ran too fast. She even forgot the sound of her own name being called across the park.
Up there, she thought she was escaping, but really she was leaving fragments of herself behind: making a hole with her sneakers in the sand, the aches in her fingers after she finally made it across the monkey bars for the very first time.
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Each push forward took her further from the body she knew, from the girl she had been.
When the swing reached its highest point, there was a split second where everything felt suspended: her body, her breath, even time. When she looked down again, the ground she used to be so afraid to fall on as a child was no longer recognizable.
The park had dissolved so much so that it looked like she didn’t have her glasses on. The trees were mere smudges of green. The sandbox looked like a blob of beige. The children became shadows, mere glimpses that were hard to believe were ever there to begin with.
She gripped the chains tighter, but they felt thinner, almost invisible, as if they could snap at any second because they were no longer holding her up.
And then the pain began. Not just in her hips, but in the centre of her chest, more than just the tingling of anxiety she became accustomed to, but an ache that felt like gravity calling her back so much that she felt numb to the bone.
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The chains still clanged, but the sound no longer belonged to metal but memory. Every clang was a reminder of the push she’d been given, the push she thought she wanted and the push she still had to take.
Except she was too strong to fall yet in too much pain to keep pumping her knees.
She held her hands up high where the metal rods of the swing once laid, and she did so with all her might. She did so in her attempt to not let the wind take her or derail her with every rough whoosh that hit her all at once because she was too fed up to push.
She had yet to fall because she didn’t look down, up or even in front. She just closed her eyes and found trust in the jerking movements that soon felt like sways.
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She breathed for the first time in a while, remembering why she went on the swings in the first place. She wanted to fly, to have the power not only to have more control over her own destiny but also to see the world from up above, not below —truly see it and herself for all their beauty.
But flying wasn’t the same thing as leaving because she always managed to return.
She once thought that meant that she wasn’t flying high enough, but she never really wanted to escape, just find her place and often in life that place isn’t a specific destination, but is yourself and she was finally okay with that.
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Because when the swing finally slowed, and the sky loosened its grip on her, she realized she didn’t have to be the girl who ran from pain or the woman who drowned in it. It was possible for her to be both; the child who once scraped her knees and the grown version who still carried the sting.
Her feet touched the ground for the first time in what felt like forever, shaky but steady.
The chains no longer wobbled. They came to pause, a sense of calm just as she did when regulating her breaths.
And maybe, just maybe, that was enough.
The sand was never meant to be an hourglass, the chains of the swing were never meant to tremble in her palms.
The clanging and the wobbling wasn’t the swing at all but the sound of herself trying to come back down.
After all, growing up didn’t mean escaping but carrying that little girl in a way nobody else ever could.
