On an amber day in the backyard, I am seated on a plastic swing, the beams trapezoidal and of a cool, green, metallic quality. I am seated opposite my brother on the basket’s symmetrical yellow seats. We are outside in the sun, in a garden with blue-tongued lizards biting at strawberry shrubs, the curry tree snaking the far-right corner wall, the neighbour's blackberries melting over the left fence. A pebbled pathway leads into a bouncy blue pool that we will probably swim in later. Our mother peeks at us intermittently, curiously, wondering if we have reached the point of a wrestling match yet. Our father is taking a nap.
On this summer day, I do not know what happens after my age stops being a single digit. I face my brother on the swing, unaware that one day, I will have nothing left to teach him for the first time. The faint breeze carries my voice from the future, reaching out with worn hands, begging me to remember every warm, glowing moment. The comfort I will yearn for when his small hands outgrow mine, our entwined hands and lives slipping away at the edge of childhood. Here, laughing on this pendulum, we only know of a life where we hide under duvets and weave stories in whispers under the pale lights of glow-in-the-dark stars. I do not know what it means to live in a home without my brother. I do not even know such a life can exist.
I am seated on this swing that will one day give out because it cannot bear the weight of our ages, the paint waiting to be dulled by the sun and the nails preparing to rust from the rain. This home will soon stop being mine, and we will give up this swing set in a garage sale filled with things that refract my upbringing, fragments finding their ways into brown boxes that will travel the world and sit in lofts. I will spend my future, much like everyone promoted to an age that is not a single digit, wondering when life stopped feeling languid and saturated, and why I wished so desperately to grow up before I had to.
But those are thoughts for someone else to have, someone without a swing set in their backyard. Today, I am suspended in the middle of motion, the blur around me dizzying while I am perfectly still. On this sunflower yellow seat in the ochre sunlight, babbling in ribbons of laughter, face to face with my flesh and blood that I never want to be separated from, I am not grown up. I will be on this swing forever, remembering what I will forget, clinging onto the visions that blur when I squint in my mind.
Vividly inked trapezoids. Tender amber. Longing.
