what the seesaw saw

Content Warning: allusions to child abuse, and mental health themes (trauma and PTSD)

"It was a game," I say in a quiet voice.

It makes me feel small to talk about it, vulnerable.

Jasper perches on the edge of the playset above me. It's old and weathered, creaking under his palms when he shifts his weight. I lean my back against its worn wooden posts, tipping my chin up to the breeze. It smells like summer at eight years old in Florida heat with a playset just like this one, old and worn and weathered. There's a weight about it that seems ancient, as though it has witnessed everything that occurred on its grounds, all of it carved into its beaten-down surface.

"At least," I continue, "that's what he played it off as."

Jasper lets out a low breath. The playset creaks again below him.

"That's sick," he says at last, spitting it like he can't get it out of his mouth fast enough.

We both have always had a problem with words. The thing is, once you say something out loud, then that makes it real.

I stare at the seesaw on the other side of the playground. Even though I chose a spot far away from it, I can't stop looking at it. It feels familiar in opposite ways. I want to smile, and I want to scream. I can still hear it creak as it tilts up and down, so clearly, almost the same as when Jasper shifts his weight above me, old, weathered, and strangely ancient.

I remember how much I loved that seesaw.

"It makes me sick," I say.

The clouds are fluffy and the sky a bright crystal blue. I almost have to shut my eyes. Thirteen years but it still feels like yesterday.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to." Jasper's voice is quiet now, soft in a way that summer never was.

"No, I want to." I force the memories back and sit up straighter. "I just--there's no right way to process this kind of thing, you know?" I release my arms, drop them. "Talk about it. Don't talk about it. Everyone says something different. I mean, what am I supposed to think?"

The playset creaks again and I cringe. A bee buzzes around my head. The sun is warm on my bare skin. I can almost taste the sawdust we used to throw on the bonfire.

"It was every summer." I swallow the lump in my throat. "We'd go down to Florida to visit them. I loved it there, you know?" I laugh, bitter, "that old playset and that stupid seesaw. God, I loved that stupid seesaw...

"We're not actually related." The words are getting heavier. They stick to the top of my mouth like glue and I have to fight to get them out. "He married my grandma before I was born though, so it always felt like it. It's comforting to know now, even though I guess it doesn't really matter. I'm just glad that no part of me has any real connection to any part of him."

Jasper hums in understanding. This is the first time I've told him this, the first time I've talked about it with someone other than my parents. My parents who didn't understand and blamed me for ruining their family. I can't afford a therapist either, not with all these college loans. I never thought I needed one before, but sitting here on this playground with the sun and the blue sky and that stupid seesaw, I'm starting to realize just how much I've pushed down and locked away.

"I don't even know where to start."

I can feel Jasper's eyes on me. The weight of his gaze is almost as heavy as the weight of this playground, its dirt, its dust, its eyes.

"Anywhere," he tells me, “Wherever feels right. It doesn't have to make sense at first, you know? Just let it out."

I suppress a smile that hurts. Jasper's been my closest friend for three years. For three years we shared everything, our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams, even our pain. But this was the one thing I could never share with him. I couldn't let him see how it tainted me. I'd always been so unbreakable in his eyes.

"I guess I'll start with today then." I relent. "It's like I forget it happened, all the time, but I never really do, you know? It's always there, lingering in the background, ready to pop up again at any moment."

The silence curls around me like smoke, wisps in the air I can almost see. I can almost see him too, at eight years old, in Florida summer heat, with weathered playsets with seesaws that creaked. His laughter tangles with the silence and I suppress the urge to curl into myself.

I'm supposed to be strong.

"Every time I see something that reminds me--crystal blue skies, fluffy cumulus clouds," I chuckle a little, remembering how I used to be so obsessed with the names of the clouds, "hot summer days, seesaws..." I get quiet and I can't bring myself to continue.

"Those things are everywhere, Les." Jasper murmurs.

I nod my head. My eyes burn.

"Yeah," is all I say.

"Jesus."

Jasper swings down from the playset and plops onto the mulch beside me. He leaves a little crevice of space between us, but I destroy it, turning to bury my head in his shoulder.

"I feel so broken, Jas," I croak. "All the time and I don't even realize it."

He wraps his arms around me and pulls me close. He's the only one I've ever let hold me like this.

"It's so subtle," I continue, "and yet so vivid, like plugging your ears during a fire alarm. It's muffled but it's still all you can hear. It's everywhere."

He's everywhere.

I huddle closer. Jasper feels so steady right now, the only rock in a raging storm, and I let myself cling to him. There's something ancient about him too, about the way I know I can trust him.

"He'd take us to the playground, just him, me, and my brother." I hear my own words like an echo behind me. Jasper grabs my hand, and I blink the memories away and squeeze tight. "My brother would go off to play in the woods and he would--" I stop.

Across from us, the summer sun is starting to set. I breathe a little easier.

The shadows draw closer as I tell Jasper what happened, memory after memory, every Florida summer, every trip to the playground. I tell him about that stupid seesaw, tell him about what happened on it. By the time I finish, the sun is gone and the darkness has gotten cold. It feels ancient too, this night the same as the ones that rescued me back when I was eight years old.

"There's no right way to process this kind of thing," Jasper tells me after I admit how confused I am about what I'm supposed to feel.

"Sad? Angry? Hurt?" I whisper to him in the dark, our fingers intertwined, "All of the above? None of it? I'm just confused." I sigh, "and lost."

And broken.

"You're not broken, Leslie." Jasper breathes to me, and I almost smile at how well he knows me. "All of it, none of it, it doesn't matter. You're not broken. Look at how far you've come. You were just a kid, just a kid who went through all that and came out like this." He shifted so he could face me, and look me in the eyes. "You should feel so proud to have come out like this."

His eyes are blue, silver in the moonlight, and so earnest it hurts.

"I know," I say. My voice is quiet. It makes me feel so small. "It doesn't always feel that way, but I know."

Wind sweeps over the playground and the seesaw behind me creaks at the pressure.

"I love seesaws," I confess. "Even after everything. Even though every time I see one, I feel sick and scared and broken.”

I sigh and lean into Jasper. He holds me close, his warmth wrapped around me like a blanket.

A short chime breaks the silence between us. It’s fully dark now, the stars above us shimmering across the sky, but I still hesitate, a lump in my throat as I pull my phone from my pocket. I turn it on, hands shaking as I try to get it to recognize my thumbprint. I have to enter my password, and that too takes an eternity. Finally, the screen settles on my messages and I force myself to read them.

“Les,” Jasper’s voice pulls me back to the playground. I don’t know how long I’ve been staring at the words. “Is it…?”

He doesn’t say the name, not even a pronoun. The ghost already hovers over me; I don’t need it to feel any more real than it already does.

“Yeah.” I turn off my phone, set it in my lap. I tilt my head up to stare at the sky. The fluffy cumulus clouds are gone, and so is the sun and its heat, but I can still feel them like they’re buried inside my bones. It’s there and not there all at once, like I’ve got a foot in two worlds and I can’t anchor myself to either one.

“My grandma heard back from the doctors.” I force the words out. As much as I don’t want it to be real, it is. "She said they think he had a stroke.”

The burn of tears comes suddenly and I can’t hold them back.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I choke out. “I feel upset and I feel angry and I feel relieved too and it’s all a giant muddled mess. I can’t make sense of any of it. Am I supposed to want him dead? I do, sometimes.” A sob hitches my words. I wipe my hands across my cheeks but the tears just keep coming. “Sometimes, I even think about killing him myself.”

Jasper grabs onto my hands. My whole body is trembling, but he calls my gaze back to his and holds me there.

“But then I think that’s messed up and that’s not who I am, but he deserves it, Jasper! After what he did to me!” My voice raises, the shaking only getting worse, and when the wind creaks the seesaw behind me, I break down, clutching onto my best friend as I cry.

“It’s okay, Les,” Jasper whispers into my hair. He pulls me closer. “It’ll be okay.”

“How?” I whisper.

Jasper rubs his hand up and down my back. “I don’t know,” he admits, sighing, “but I’m here, okay?”

My heart squeezes tight.

“I don’t know what I want.” A pause. “It would be easier if he was dead. I could have my family back. There’d be no reason for them to hate me.” I sigh. The tears start to slow, the taste of desperation fading from my salt-crusted lips. “But should I even want them back? After how they’ve treated me through this?” I grow quiet. “After they wouldn’t believe me?”

Jasper exhales and the heat of it brushes across the top of my head. “They don’t deserve you, Leslie.” He murmured. “You needed their support more than ever and they cast you out for it. But they’re still your family.”

“Does that even mean anything? He was supposed to be my family too.”

“I don’t know,” he breathes.

“Then what do I do?”

Jasper lifts my chin and wipes the last of the tears. “Try to take it one moment at a time.”

“One moment feels like a thousand. A thousand in slow motion.”

And it hurts. Every single second of it hurts so much.

“I feel so small, so vulnerable.” I can almost taste the desperation again, clinging to the pain curled tight around my heart.

“You’re not vulnerable.” Jasper’s gaze steadies on my own. “Not anymore.”

I can only look back at him, fall into the fierce look in his eyes. He has known me better than anyone else ever has. Even in this, in what I have never told him out loud.

“He can’t hurt you now.” Jasper’s voice is firm, his hands around mine warm and tight. “He can’t hurt you ever again, not if you don’t let him.”

“It’s more complicated than that, Jas.”

“I know.” He gives me a crooked smile. “It always is. But you’re strong. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known. It’s okay to feel weak, to feel broken and hurt. But hold onto your strength just as tightly. You can feel weak and be strong at the same time.”

I don’t answer for a while, leaning against him in the dark, staring down at the mulch matted beneath us from hundreds of little feet.

“I don’t want him to die,” I confess. “At least not yet. I’m not ready, not when my anger still feels so violent. That’s not who I am or who I want to be. You’re right, Jas,” I give him a small wobbly smile, “I won’t let him take anything more from me. He doesn’t get to keep ruling my mind. He doesn’t get to control me.” Even when he’s not here, even when I haven’t seen him in years. Somehow, he always has a way of getting back to me.

Not anymore.

“I hope he lives. And I heal. And I can look him in the eye one day and not feel a single thing. I want him to know that he means nothing to me. That despite it all, he took nothing from me. I want him to know I am whole. And he’s not a single part of that.”

My phone chimes again and I tense. Jasper squeezes my hands. I’m here, his eyes seem to say. With trembling hands, I pull out my phone. Even after everything I said, it still makes me feel so small.

“He’s going to be alright,” I read aloud. I feel something twist in my stomach, something like disappointment, something almost like relief. “At least for now.”

I can’t bring myself to say any more, so I just sit in the dark, leaning against the playset, Jasper holding me close. Across the playground, the seesaw creaks in the breeze, and I squeeze Jasper’s hand tight. It feels strangely ancient, the emotion seeping through me, like it's something I’ve always had inside of me, this strength combined with this weakness.

Sometimes, I think it’s okay to feel vulnerable, to feel small. The stars wink at me from above, like somehow, they know too.

Small can be just as powerful.