For the past few days it has been true spring in Seattle. The afternoon skies are cloudless. The lilacs--my favorite flower--are sagging on their branches in fragrant purple clusters. The wild rabbits that live in some hidden nook of our backyard have emerged to launch their attack against our dandelions. With temperatures in the high 70s to mid 80s, we can finally throw open our windows without getting cold.
It's my first spring without the evergreen I climbed as a child. In its absence, as the evenings stretch themselves later and later, I find I am seeing my neighborhood in a way I never have before. The tree had shielded my window from the road and the cul-de-sac on the other side of our pasture. These days I can sit at my window at 8:30 at night, the remnants of a bloodshot sunset sinking beneath the trees, and watch taillights disappear up the hill, lights come on in upstairs windows and a single frenetic bat--and I'm sure it's the same one every night--looping one exhausted circle after another in the falling light.
A few evenings ago I knelt on my floor and leaned on my windowsill to listen to a game of hide-and-seek being played in the yard of a neighboring house. The girl counted to 20, speeding through the final five numbers in that way we all did when we thought that because you couldn't see us you couldn't hear us either. "Ready or not, here I co--found you, Nadine, you're under the slide!" The round lasted less than the length of a single breath. The girl counted again. "Eighteennineteentwenty! Ready or not, here I come--FOUND YOU, NADINE!" I laughed and shook my head. Poor Nadine, I thought. This just isn't her game.
And then I thought: It's me. I'm her. Here was a girl who was, despite her best efforts, found. Her friend knew, probably before she even started counting, that Nadine would be under the slide. She probably positioned her body facing the slide so that all she had to do to catch Nadine was open her eyes. Maybe not even Nadine herself realized this. Maybe each time her friend started counting, Nadine's eyes would dart from one side of the yard to the other in search of the perfect hiding place. Behind the bushes? No, there were snakes back there. On the wooden bench on the deck? No, you could see through the slats. Under the slide? Yes. Genius. Maybe Nadine went through this process every time they played, and every time they played she was sure that this would be the time she wouldn't be found. But she always was, quiet little Nadine, huddled under the slide with her eyes squeezed shut, oblivious to the fact that for the rest of her life this is who she would be: the girl who weighed her options but always chose the familiarity of the shadows underneath the slide.
I have spent so many years trying to be unpredictable. Those who know me well will find this entertaining, as I am so profoundly, oftentimes upsettingly predictable that you wouldn't even conceive of my attempts to be otherwise. My idea of switching it up on a Friday night is reading a history of the Bosnian Crisis rather than my trusted companion, Anne of Green Gables. Nonetheless, I like to think that I have the capacity to be spontaneous--to shock people. Witnessing Nadine's inevitable hide-and-seek collapses was a stinging uppercut of reality: I am not predictable. I am not mysterious. I am simply a twenty-five-year-old child who is more found than I ever wanted to be.
And you know what? Given the chance to play a round of hide-and-seek, me and Nadine against Nadine's friend, I don't have a doubt in my mind as to where we would hide.
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