In a tired park in the neighborhood near my school, chain -bound fences from overgrown grass and weathered wooden benches weigh the hiking trail on which the twilight baths passers -by in ginger light and soften the rough expressions that they have developed. The first time that I visited this place was in the last winter break of the high school – the temperatures that were just low enough to frost the Redbud trees along the sidewalks. On the other side of my street, a man with a sun -stained skin was sitting with a dry, suffocated gasps every few minutes before coughing blood. I kept my breath between his cough, with my own lungs tightened with each of his tedious breaths. Every time his body cramped with another cough, I felt the urge to turn away both and to pull closer, in this sensitive space between respect for his privacy and an inexplicable need to endure witnesses. I would pretend to read my book and turn pages too quickly to actually absorb words. Sometimes our eyes met briefly and in these moments I wondered whether my presence was an undesirable memory of his vulnerability or whether it might be comfort not to be alone with his pain. I have learned to sit in this contradiction to understand how witnesses can be both an penetration and an act of care.
There were also other regular guests, their routines, which were as predictable as the changing shadows on the uneven bottom of the park. A group of older men gathered near the chess table every morning, their conversations switched between Spanish and English, and their laughter transported over the morning silence. I often sat nearby and pretended to study her weathered hands when they moved parts across the board. Every gesture with decades of similar morning, similar movements. Sometimes they looked at me and offered a nod or a smile, and I feel seen at the same time and invisible – just as I preferred to exist in this room.
I didn't return to the park for a while, but when I did, I started to recognize patterns. There is the older woman who comes every Tuesday with a paperback novel and a thermal cion tea, her silver hair catches up with the morning light while turning every page with careful advice. Sometimes they suddenly pause and look at nothing special as if the words have triggered memories that would rather not disturb them. On some days she marks her place with a pressed flower, sometimes with old receipts or faded photos that look out between the sides. Her wedding ring, relaxed now on her finger and turns absent when she reads.
Every weekend near the playground, a father of his daughter taught his daughter to ride a bike, and his hands were protecting near her shoulders when she took her hands forward in a white grip on the handlebar. From my bank under the maple tree, I leaned slightly with each of her attempts, my own body remembered the exact moment between falling and flying. Your shadow extends long over the cracked sidewalk, and separates with every pedal beat. When she occasionally finds her balance and drives freely, her father's face has an expression of joy.
Other moments also require that we publish what we always knew and trust the way before us, even if it breaks off from the familiar soil. In a quiet afternoon I saw a different kind of letting go. A young couple sat opposite each other and with faces that were painted by distant views, as if they were waiting for the reality of the moment to dawn. After a few more moments had passed, the tears climbed in their eyes and let them be released uncomfortably under the weight of a crushed silence. After exchanging a few words, they got up, pushed in their chairs and went. Broken of the broken vows are still in their throats to say goodbye to each other.
Between the rusted swings and the fences of the chainlink, I am attracted to the raw humanity that unfolds here. In this tired park in the neighborhood I found an unexpected reading in storytelling. The man with his blue-stained cough did not teach me mortality, as I thought for the first time, but about the strange ways to the connection, as I started to keep my breath between his cough, and my body synchronizes with his suffering in a way that could be understood how intimacy can form without words.
The chess players near the concrete tables showed me something similar in their own way – they never spoke over mumbles, but their hands moved with such a familiarity about the boards that words seemed unnecessary. If you captured a bit, he held it too long and turned it over in his fingers before he put it aside as if he were remembering all other games in which the same piece had fulfilled the same fate.
From the idle ring ring of the silver-haired woman, I did not learn about the loss, but about how stories in the smallest gestures life, and sometimes the most revealing moment is not in the dramatic break of her reading, but fidget in this unconscious.
The father and daughter showed me something unexpected when I write myself – not the obvious metaphor about learning and letting go, but about how stories exist in the room between people, in the curved air between his floating hands and their shoulders, in the fusion and separation of shadows, which say more truth than their actual movements. And this couple with their destructive silence – they taught me that the story is sometimes not in what breaks, but how humans arrange their bodies for an absence, how they navigate the negative space of what is no longer there.
Here, among these weathered benches and overgrown grass, I have learned that observation is not about paying attention to the obvious turning points, but to catch the small, strange moments that show how we show our stories in our bodies, in our unconscious movements, in the subtle and unusual moments when we simply live our lives in our body.