Hopscotch

I'm running, in heels, to be somewhere. I'm a little late. I'm always a little late.

One of my shoes touches a pebble accidentally and it flies out before me, in a short arc. It happens so suddenly. I am flooded, in those seconds before it falls back to earth, with an abrupt confusion of emotions. Fear. Yearning. Hope.

It skitters to a stop and I am six years old again.

Holding a pebble, turning its flat edges in my palm until it is slightly warm. Weighing it. Calculating. Then, release.

And the clench in my stomach as I pour every ounce into its curved descent, willing it, wishing it. Knowing it too late to change where it fell, but raising up on tiptoe to silently urge it on nonetheless.

A little farther, just a little, oh, oh. Oh.

Chalklines on the pavement. Chalkdust marks on our clothes. Faces, bodies, screwed up in concentration until the bell went, or the light went. Endless summer evenings and the call for dinner, call for bed. Live to play another day.

My palms itch to pick the pebble up.

For what? What would I do with it?

I don't know.

Yearning, yearning.

I leave the pebble be, and keep walking, passed the green-glassed office blocks. I glimpse myself in their mirrored surface, green-hued. A jawline, a flick of hair, a foot in mid-step. Little pieces that I can't put together for a moment.

Someone I don't recognise for a moment.

I wonder what that six year old would think of me.