POV: Like Children.

POV ("point of view") is a series that addresses many of the same themes covered in my Equals Record column: growing up, saying yes to adventure, learning to embrace a quarter-life crisis. Each POV entry will include a photograph and a short reflection based on what’s pictured. While my previous column focused largely on ideas, POV will focus on moments - glimpses, glances, tiny stories.  

My niece, nearly five, spent much of yesterday afternoon in nothing but a pair of flowered underwear, a set of spangled butterfly wings, and a silk scarf the color of bubblegum. Rapturous, high on blueberry pie and Cracker Jacks, she danced down the length of her living room, shrieking with arms outstretched. 

There’d been a party that day, with treats and toys and a crowd of other children she’d been anxious to play with - in particular, one little sandy-haired boy who’d spent most of his time roaming the apartment on his own. The underweared shrieking, my brother explained in a whisper, was her subtle way of corralling his attention.

I sat with my friends who were visiting for the afternoon, and watched her.

“I feel like doing that sometimes,” Jamie said.

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Monday afternoon, I finished work early. Uneager to begin the two-mile walk home to my Greenpoint sublet, I did what I do best these days: I wandered. I sampled shards of dark chocolate at a local chocolate factory; flipped through art magazines at the bookshop; rummaged in a shed of antiques, looking over rusted popcorn poppers, painted birdcages, and bins of decaying photographs sorted by decade. 

At five, I walked to the park. A breeze was blowing; children in sandals climbed trees. Squirrels peered through tall grass, whiskers twitching, and a man with a boom box played Whitney Houston.

I called Lily. “I felt sad when I woke up today,” I told her. “And I can’t shake it.” 

A lot had happened the week prior, she pointed out; the drawn-out, grown-up equivalent of a party with Cracker Jacks and mystifying strangers. 

“I think I’m crashing,” I told her. “Like when babies have too much stimulation and get fussy.”  

I remembered walking down Kent Avenue on a hot afternoon months ago. On my way, I’d gotten a phone call from someone I’d met recently. He couldn’t see me anymore, he said. My first thought was that I wished I was a child, that I could lay down in the middle of the sidewalk and refuse to move. That someone would come and pick me up and carry me home.

To my left, a little girl dangled from a tree branch, leather-bound sword in hand.

“Where are you right now?” Lily asked. “Maybe what you need is to get out and sit in the park.”

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Weeks ago, on a friend’s birthday, I baked a cake. We took it with us to a bar and served it; in lieu of candles, which no one had thought to bring, someone had rolled bits of paper towels into sticks and lit them on fire. After the flames had been extinguished, an onlooker picked a piece of charred towel off the cake, thinking it was food, and ate it.

By the end of the night, we’d collapsed in a heap back at the birthday girl's apartment. The bottoms of my feet, I noticed, were stained black.

“It means I had a good night,” I told everyone, remembering that I’d danced barefoot. 

As a child, I’d often found consolation in being told that cuts and bruises, scrapes and stains were evidence of adventure.

I closed my eyes as I talked; I said I’d wash them in the morning.

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You can find my previous POV entries, here, and the archive for my personal essay column on the Equals Record, here. Thank you so much for your support! Photo via my Instagram.