The Swing Girl

 

When we are not travelling...

There’s this girl I know who swings. She stands on the plank, holding on to the chains that link the pendulum and an endless stretch to the unknown. He hair glows under the moonlit sky, her lips curves into a wistful smile, her eyes sparkle with lots of courage, and fear, and uncertainty of her prospects.

I can hear the chains squeak each time she swings by, suspended in time at one point, then fall with a speed accelerated with gravity. Her dress thrashes as the wind brushes upon her.

Beneath her, is profound darkness, abysmal, distant; you can hear the running water and its ferociously echo. Home is just steps away on the shore behind. It’s one of those things that you know it’s there but always out of reach; she’s too much in the action to really turn her head now. A familiar force pushes her up against the invisible obstacles every time she swings back to that shore. There’s mother’s embrace and friends’ fist bumps. “We’ll catch you whenever you decide to let go.” They say. They’ll be disappointed, surely, but they will catch her, surely. In front of her, a light shimmers through the darkness, from a path that leads on towards the future. She’s just one risk away from it, as long as she let go when she swings up towards the other side, she would let go, and leap, before gravity pulls her back down again.

Yet gravity pulls her back down again and she skims across the night sky, her feet rip apart the stillness of the atmosphere. She starts to try different things, picturing in her head, that the next time the force propels here upwards, it’d be the chance of flight. And on the grassy shore there’s serenity, optimistic plans, and lots of next steps.

There are spectators all around her, passing swiftly across the air. She’s suspended in an absolutely open space, yet simultaneously amidst a crowd of strange figures, with blank faces and movements as light as a feather, weightless, almost floating, almost transparent, surrounding her, omnipresent figures. And patterns made up with passages and words, chopped up and reassembled together, bustling about and filling her entire spectrum. She would hear voices, murmuring a familiar melody that she couldn’t seem to recall.

And she keeps on swinging.

At least the last time I saw her, she was still there, suspended between past and future, living her every moment pandering whether to let go of herself to the unknown, or to the deliciously dangerous temptation called, failure.

Both options take courage. And I heard one of the spectators say: “what a wonderful performance this has been!”