THE
PLAYGROUND
In a darker place, in a darker time, the remnants of a playground where children play lies surrounded by the city. It's a black-and-white, grainy, dirty little place, but it's all the children have. They play, laugh, fight, bump into one another, and try to fit in, in this black-and-white, dirty, little playground.
One day a little boy sees a little girl by herself, hunched down close to the ground, looking at something. He goes over and kneels next to her, and sees this beautiful, colorful flower growing. He looks up at her, and in that moment, they too appear in full color to each other. They give the flower some water, admire it together for a time, and then part to rejoin their respective groups, in this land of black-and-white.
In a few days, they meet again at the flower, and again tend to it, and admire it together. The sensation of radiant beauty, the vibrant color that existed in this little world while they were together, became something they both wanted more of. But their lives were defined by the black and white people and the groups they had to return to each time, and so their colorful time together was always too short. But they tended to this flower, because they knew how fragile it was, and how it could be swallowed up by the hard world around them, and they didn't want to lose it.
As days went by, they watered, fertilized, and tended to the flower. The little girl, at first worried that spending too much time there with the boy would block the light from this flower, saw, instead, that the flower thrived on their attention. Soon, another, then another flower bloomed next to it. Before long, a whole garden was in breathtaking bloom. The little boy and little girl wondered, how could this incredible beauty exist amidst the mad, thoughtless, chaos of the playground all around it. When the little girl asked a trusted friend, the friend replied, "What flowers?" Puzzled, the little girl replied,"Right there!" And her friend just shrugged her shoulders and walked away. The little boy and the little girl looked at each other, radiant in their colorful beauty… and smiled.
06/19/08 - MJD
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