I pull myself up

I gaze up at the metal bar, dizzy at its improbable height.

All around me families spin in their carefree play. A dad grasps the handle of the merry-go-round, struggling to run faster in his flip-flops as his blond-haired daughter squeals. A mother pushes her young toddler on the swing. The child’s black hair lifts in the breeze as he tips his head back.

My chest aches with the memory of that craving to go higher and higher on the swing, certain my feet would touch the moon; certain I could fling myself into orbit.

My body feels heavy now though, heavy and earthbound.

The doctors told me I could feel some depression afterwards; that this was physiologically to be expected when pregnancy hormones stopped so suddenly.

They didn’t tell me that children’s laughter would shudder across my skin.

That their joy would assault me.

I gaze up at the bar again, determined. I only have two months left until the wild-land firefighting season and I want to make the elite hotshot crew this summer as one of the few female firefighters. So much feels insurmountable right now, broken open, drifting: my relationship with my ex-boyfriend; my focus on my studies at a rigorous, liberal arts college where I just entered on full scholarship; my body. But at least the physical tests I need to make hotshot feel tangible. One of the many is to do nine pull ups.

I gaze up at the bar again, in disbelief at the displacement between the it and my body. The space yawns above me. How will I ever pull myself up?

Suddenly, the blond girl from the merry-go-round appears beside me. Her skin and hair gleam in the sun — she is too luminous for me to look at directly.

“I can do a flip on this bar, wanna see?” She announces, and shimmies her way up on the lower bar beside mine, resting her weight on her belly, and then hitching up and flinging one leg over to spin all the way around.

“See?” She challenges from her perch, shaking her blonde curls back from her eyes to peer at me: “Can you do that?”

My legs are leaden, clumsy. Never again will I move with the grace she owns. I feel her on my periphery, like a flame at the edge of a dense forest.

“Well, I just want to pull myself up,” I admit, my voice rusty. Too much thinking these past months. Recently, I have not heard my voice speak a truth out loud. At my disclosure to this vibrant young girl, I feel raw, and awkwardly adult.

I am neither mother, nor child, but without role in this park created for families.

An intruder.

“Well, then do it,” she rejoins, and flips around the bar again to punctuate her point.

I look up. Will my hands up. Large, freckled, they clasp the bar and commit me. Heat washes over me and then cold.

What am I doing here?

I heft myself up halfway and then hang, unable to pull my sodden body up the rest of the way. I kick my feet, graceless. A whale stuck on a beach with no retreat. I grunt, memories coursing through my arms and back of executing pull-ups in elementary school and in a souped-up weight room with my male cousins.

Borrowed adrenaline surges through me. Some sort of reckless energy from before.

And I am up.

Chin hooked over the bar, gasping. Looking out at the maple tree heavy with budding leaves, my eyes burn to hear the young girl clap for me.