It had never been an extremely equipped playground: probably the slide and the swing that stood at its center were rarely replaced and only repainted or adjusted to the best possible by the most frequent visitors.
Or rather, the escorts of these.
The children long ago saw it as a corner of paradise, but now two benches destroyed on the sides were placed on the high weed up to the femur; of the swing there had remained only the unstable support with the rusty chain that, swinging at the slightest breath of wind, A shrill squeak was emitting. The only thing left of the chute was the stairs eaten by the termites. The trees surrounding the sides of the park were almost completely dry; one of them had fallen to the ground, uprooted.
Without the green cover of leaves that served as a dome to the whole it was even easier for him to observe the space abandoned by the roof of the building.
His legs were dangling in the void, motionless. His hands were leaning against the ledge with unprecedented ease: he didn't even hold on to it. The small metal plates that were applied around his fingers dressed his hands like a tailor-made glove. Sometimes he would tap the tips on the stone edge and a cold ticking over the other noises.
That place had definitely changed over the years. No car had been there for a long time.
He filled his lungs with air in a long breath; he closed his eyes and made his back adhere to the tiled slope behind him.
It took him a long time to learn how to bear the weight the plaques applied to his chest caused when he wore them. He and his team had spent years working on the search for the right chemical composition: nothing too heavy or too little resistant had been considered in the slightest. After testing an alloy of stainless steel and titanium the choice had been almost instinctive: they had found it. Now, that complex of glossy thin plates had become too important to be considered a costume or armor; for every time he found himself wearing it an extra cell of his body had learned to regard it as an extension of his limbs. At that moment he felt as if the whole complex he was wearing was an integral part of himself.
A leaf began to tremble among the brushwoods, it freed itself from the ground and moved away from the ground. Veins of light branched off from the stem and spread. He came to the branch and came back to life, green as he once was. She was soon joined by her other companions.
The weeds dropped back to green grass and fresh dew. The rusty iron began to reflect the sunlight returning to the typical silver color. Everything returned to its place; the screws of the benches had tightened the wooden boards drawn to the original place.
The children ran around the games laughing and screaming, while the parents chatted about topics they could not talk about in front of their children.
A little girl with big dark eyes and long brown hair gathered in two braids smiled alone on the swing; she had recently learned this new skill. In the previous days he had tried and tried again, sometimes falling on the grass, only to be able to impress the baby with dark hair, the only one in the group able to go on the swing without even the initial push of his mother.
She found him very cute when he smiled and wore that crown-shaped hat.
One day he gave her a four-leaf clover, which she thought was just a green flower. She wanted to be friends with him at all costs, every time he seemed to look back at the her she gave herself a strong push with short legs and swung so high that she seemed to touch the sky, while the braids swung back and forth on his little shoulders.
The little prince, for his part, only looked back when he heard the little girl crying.
This was on the ground with a peeled knee, one of its braids had shattered; part of the loose hair was formed by long waves. To her right she had just stopped from rolling a red inflatable ball.
He immediately ran to her with the other children, all but one.
This one, on the other side of the swing, was slowly approaching. The little prince had withdrawn the red ball and, with the maximum level of insults of a child, had forced him to leave. She then embraced the child and picked up the pink elastic band from the ground. They smiled and he had accompanied her with the other children from the parents' group.
"That's what I did!" he exclaimed by taking off his hat and leaving it to his mother. Then I brought a cookie to the little girl who stopped crying and couldn't stop smiling.
He exhales realizing only then that he has held his breath for so long. Not all places in the neighborhood brought him back to good memories but he thought it was normal: he had spent all the years after his birth in that fraction of town and, although he did not like to admit it to himself, his life had never been ordinary.
He leaned forward by detaching his back from the support and leaning toward the void. At that moment he thought to Esme: if he could see him he would certainly not have refrained from expressing his discontent with the recklessness of the boy. For a moment he seemed to hear his voice from the headset he carried to his ear, disconnected; the last thing he needed at that time was an audio link to the Beginning.
Being able to find moments of calm in solitude had become tremendously complicated. He brought a hand to the left of the chest. Wedged between the metal plates was a raw gem with greenish luminescence. He would never get tired of that color, he would never get tired of that singular part of the clothing he wore. Sometimes he found it difficult to realize that he himself, over the years, had become a security, a constant symbol of hope for so many people who had forgotten what it was like to believe in a better future.
Suddenly he let himself fall and, for a moment, he managed to feel weightless, part of the same air he breathed.
There was a metallic thud. After that only the squeaking of a rusty chain.