Someone else’s heart
Pumping someone else’s blood
(Regina Spektor)
At the moment of a traumatic event a person will sometimes feel themselves rising above it – to be free, safe, away. Maybe this was what
Kundera meant by the unbearable lightness of being. So in that moment of dissociation, much more happens than a simple rising above it all. It is an exodus, an emptying. Something empty happens. It isn’t free. It is the opposite: choices disappear, ticking off like divers into a pool. I felt myself leaving myself in the Park when I was that little boy and Robby the lifeguard assaulted me in the dark. I don’t know. I can’t buy back the innocence I went in there with. You can’t believe a used car salesman more than once. It changes things.
I have returned to myself, to the Park and to the ground. I am me. I am whole. I have done the work to regain choices in my life, and I am free. The Park, frozen in 1976, can have all its good memories for me. I learned to swim there, I learned left-handed lay ups in the 7th grade and shot about 100,000 of them to make sure. I learned tennis and baseball. I learned about girls, a little. Seems like the wind was always blowing there. When I rode my bike there I was either straining against the gales or being hurtled up Congressional, will-less and silent with the wind at my back. It was blowing the night I took these photos – just two weeks ago. I was the ghost haunting this place and the wind was blowing clean through the overgrown trees and the cut grass and across the surface of the blue, memory-less water.
I have really enjoyed reading your thoughts. I loved the look back and the glimpses into your/our adolescences.…it really took me back.
I wondered how or even why you remembered the lifeguards name, why it mattered in the grand scheme of things, and why you “shouldn’t have been there”. But only gave it a moment.
You know when people tell their stories, when they are in the midst of pain, why is it so easy to miss? Do they do a good job of masking, or do we do horrible job of listening.…maybe both? Or maybe it’s that we just want to believe the best of people, our people, our places or our time.
As a reread your post from yesterday, it was so obvious.…I want to fight. I want to fight for JUSTICE. I want to fight for Steven. I wonder about Robby.…his silence.…his decay.
Thanks for the transparency and the beautiful/horrific pictures you painted with your words of a place that I held dear once.
Thanks Tray. I know you have a full plate of activity and helping and ANC. Fortunately I have good support and have done lots of work on all the events at the Park, my growing up and my current life. It is a work in progress. Healing has happened though. You asked for details. I remember Robby because he was a turning point – he was the older lifeguard, I was the 9 year old kid. He abused me and my life was not the same after that. He lured me into the Park after hours and I had no idea. It is what it is. I write about it on the blog because the creativity is a way to buy back the Park for myself, to not give it to him. I honestly believe that this kind of work helps to rework the injury even in that moment, even still. The mystery of that is beyond me. Not talking about it would also be a way to respond, but in my case the shame of it all was killing me. So I am outing that. It happened and I have dealt with it and continue to grow from it. That part is a good thing. The pictures allow me to think about dream/memory, wind, water and the wonder of my youth splashing around in that pool with 100 other kids from my neighborhood, who I know remember this place with Ektachrome clarity…
The unbearable lightness of being has come up in many of my images in in subtle ways .…I really appreciate what you’re expressing in so many ways. And thanku for your encouragement, beauty~