by Jodi Plaia

 

I stand at the edge of the playground after school, watching a constellation of third graders, eight years old, bird-like and quick. Their hands still rounded with babyhood, reaching clumsily for one another. Soft mouths, words spilling without thought. Innocent eyes darting from place to place. They move in careless choreography – skipping, spinning, colliding.

There is a buoyancy to them. A belief the world is mostly good. They trust the grown-ups who call their names. They apologize quickly. They forgive faster. They shine with an innocence still intact.

Eight-year-olds are close to the earth. They carry stuffed animals. They mispronounce long words with confidence. When they tilt their faces up to speak, their trust makes me ache. An eight-year-old girl is not sturdy. She is not worldly. She is not responsible for the weather in a room. She is small. She is tender. She is bright.

I am studying truth – a practice given to me by my counselor, Diana: watch eight-year-old girls. See how small they are. How full of light. How breakable. 

I did not know. Not really. I am a stranger visiting my own history.

Now I see what was taken. 

Their collisions end in giggles. Mine ended in silence. Their spinning is dizzy with joy. Mine was disorientation, a world tilted around one man’s will. They are allowed to be small. I was required to be knowing. Adult words lived in my mouth before I understood them. I had to learn to read the weather of my father’s moods. To comply. At eight, my body was not my own small constellation. 

I search for her among them. I try to place her on the blacktop: white Keds, a blue sweatshirt, hair pulled back in a ponytail. I try to imagine her thin smile. Her little hands. Her soft heart. 

For years, I have remembered her as complicit, as knowing. Watching these girls, I understand something else.

She was eight. She was trying.

I remain at the edge of the playground, holding her smallness in my hands. 

I let her be eight.

 

Jodi Plaia is an emerging writer and storyteller drawn to the lyric possibilities of flash nonfiction. Her work explores memory, survival, and the long aftermath of childhood. She lives in Los Angeles, CA with her husband and their black miniature schnauzer, Bodhi.