Something I Remember from My Childhood
I used to live in a big city, where the only safe places to play and run around were the playgrounds which were scattered along the rare green spots in town. I don't remember which one of these playgrounds this took place on and it might very well be that I never find out.
Maybe it was only a nightmare and my memory combined with the usual bit of superstition makes me believe it was real. However, I remember every detail so vivid and explicit that I cannot accept this excuse. As far as I am concerned, it really happened.
At the centre of the playground it took place on was a huge slide. Of course you could climb it with the usual ladder, but for those ho were a bit more adventurous, there also were some climbing walls and ropes to climb the little tower in which the slide was contained, surrounded by an area of sand. How often I played with my friends there I cannot count, but I remember epic battles against Beduins trying to invade our fortress or evil dragons defending an ancient castle in the desert from me, the mighty adventurer.
Also I got my first kiss, which was still an innocent experience, just behind this small track of sand, hidden behind a few bushes, not far from the soccer field which was nearby.. but this is another story, which happened on a sunny day that now is forever lost but in my memory.
It was awfully hot when it happened and extremely damp too. I remember wearing my favourite t-shirt which, in retrospective, just looked plain awful. It was dark green, kinda like rotten spinach, and had a cartoon figure on it, smiling in ecstasy at something, I don't really remember what. My mother just had seen the mother of a good friend of mine and so the two were chattering about boring adult things while me and my friend were about to explore the playground for god knows what time.
This time, my friend suggested, it had to be an impenetrable fortress and only him and me, two master thieves, could enter it to steal the sacred jewel and then escape through he hidden slide there, once crafted as an emergency exit. "Yeah! Great!", I agreed and there we were, the two untraceable masters of disguise and burglary, ready to begin our work. "Hey", a voice echoed over the playground, interrupting our childish fantasies. "Wanna see something cool?"
Now, don't get me wrong. My mother had warned me about never going with strangers. Especially not creepy adults, no matter what cool things they'd promise me. I knew that this was not okay and I even understood why to a certain degree. Those men (it were always men when my mother told me about this) were NOT cool and they were gonna do evil stuff on me if they caught me.
If anybody'd ever tried something like that on me I'm fairly certain he would've been caught for I never was too far away from a trustworthy adult. But the person who spoke to me and my friend was no weird, eerie man and not a stranger either. It was a girl, around four years older than us, and I even knew her. She went to the same school as me for three years before switching to another school.
It had something to do with her classes, but back then I didn't understood it. She was tall, about two and a half heads taller than me and I was not short for my age. Her reddish hair was short for a girl, only covering her neck and she wore prominent braces. Now that I think back, I think I had a crush on her and she used me because I was pretty gullible at that age. Again and again I brought myself lower and lower just to entertain her and her friends and all that time I thought she sincerely liked me. Back then of course, I didn't knew that and neither did my friend. I didn't even know her name.
"Sure!", we both said, smiling and following her like a pair of ducklings. She smiled and turned around, showing us the way through some grove, past a gargantuan blackberry bush whose thorns looked long and sharp like blades. "It's not far from here", she said, almost shaking us off in the brush as we tried and follow her. "You'll see!"
As we got to the promised place, we saw that she wasn't alone there. Two guys stood next to her, one of them I already new. He was named Johnathan and he was mean. He had been mean to me and my friend before, but it was okay. She was here to protect us. The other one I didn't knew, but he looked big, even bigger than her and Johnathan who towered her by one or two heads. Something about him seemed wrong to me but I couldn't quiet put my finger on it back then. But it was okay. She was here.
"Look at this!"; she said and pointed to a rusty wire-mesh fence close to us. This belonged to an old soccer field which had been abandoned some time ago, left for weeds and grasses to grow there. Amidst them lay something I could not quiet identify at first so I got closer until my little fingers wrapped around the warm rusty metal, sharp spikes running over my skin, creating a pleasant raspy sensation. "It's a skeleton", she said. And now that she mentioned it, the curious little bump bekame the cranium, something I thought of as a crack in the ground became a femur and covered by blooming dandelions lay a skeletonized hand.
I had seen enough pictures of skeletons to know that those were human bones.. and I could estimate that those were the bones of a kid around my size, maybe even my age, a little taller just like I used to be back then. "Isn't that cool?", she asked. "We found him here. He was alive then, but Marcus wanted us to keep it a secret. He died two days later. You tell nobody."
They went. We went back. We played.
Two or three weeks later, she disappeared. I never saw her again. Johnathan also disappeared but I didn't miss him. I never told my parents about this experience, not even once. I promised after all and so did my friend who I haven't seen in four years now, the floating bloom of friendships formed in the youth. Even though I didn't fully understand her words back then and maybe I even fail to understand them now, I can feel that those words killed something deep inside of me that will never ever grow back.
Credited to Flyth
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