Pinpoints

The teenager watched the fountain dribble over the sides like his baby sister drooling. Even in the rain they kept it running, as if by letting it stop the spirit of the playground would choke and die.

The teenager hated this park. And yet, he would stop and watch it for a few minutes after every school day ended. He didn’t know what it was exactly about it that made him hate it. Maybe it was the perpetual state of limbo it exuded, never fully upgraded from its sand-pits, exhibiting woodchips from its next trend, showing gravel from the one after that, and highlighting its hybrid rubber safety mats under the swings as the pinnacle of eclecticity. The children were always loud, too loud, their piecing screams stabbing through the sparse and skinny trees. They bothered him, and he wondered why he hadn’t noticed their obnoxiousness when he used to play here.

He didn’t know when he’d stopped playing in the playground.

He remembered the time when he’d cracked his head open on the hot summer slide, skin sticking and squeaking as he skinned his elbows and lost his balance, getting a face full of pebbles and blood. But it wasn’t then.

He remembered playing hopscotch with his older sister and trying to show off in front of her friends to be just as cool as them, then tripping over the soles of his cheap running shoes and humiliation staining his cheeks and neck. But it wasn’t then either.

He remembered going there the week after his tenth birthday (a little later than usual because his parents had let him go there alone after supper since he had hit the double digits in age), and running around, hyped up on sour candy, until he noticed the needle next to the limply breathing body. But, after all the shouting and sirens and promising that he’d never go back again, it was not then either.

The truth was, it had happened gradually. He’d hurry to get home and play the newest video game he’d rented instead of hurrying to the swings, not emerging from the TV until well after dark and the playground was locked. Then he’d started going with his friends to the depanneur after school where they’d buy a case of Root Beer and hang around the back choking on the cigarettes they’d stolen from their parents that morning. By the time he turned fourteen, he began using the park in similar ways to those that the girl he’d found had. It was when he was high one day that he realized he hadn’t used the monkey bars or seesaw in years. The realization had left him quiet; he sat on a newly installed green plastic bench and reminisced about the rotted out wooden one that used to be there in the days of his youth while his friends spat on the concrete and scarfed down Cheetos.

Ever since then, he would stop by the park after school and stare at squirrels and children, or, in the case of today, the spluttering rain coating the scene in a plastered sort of gloom. He wouldn’t stay long; he wasn’t even sad when he would turn away from the park. It merely perplexed him how it had happened, when it had stopped meaning something to him, what had changed in him that made it not matter now.

He would then walk slowly away, as if he wasn’t even sure what it was he was leaving behind.