My memories of summer are back dropped by blue skies and clouds as soft as cotton, but the days were filled with magic. When the weather was warm I played wizard and warlock with my sister and soldiers in the sand with my brother. The magic of childhood. As I grew older I remained captivated by these games, watching children play with their paper forts and their doctor’s offices, the magic gone by nightfall.
Today, they’d dug out a box of chalk from some deep crevice of their play box and were drawing figures on the ground. My two little girls seemed to be directing the neighbor’s kids about, guiding their lines into squares and shapes. I laughed in sudden recognition of their work, it was a city. A little city made of lines of blue and pink and green swirls. There was a bank and a town hall, storefronts, apartments. It seemed as though each child was given a certain profession, they traded chewing gum for baseball cards and ran over the walls of their buildings on accident. A collage of absolute childhood and pretend, an explosion of life.
“Honey, we really need to look this over,” I heard my wife calling me from the kitchen, her voice pulling me away from the window. I let my hand drop and the blinds whisper closed before wading through the dim lighting to our kitchen. With a resigned sigh I rolled up my sleeves and sat down at the head of the table, my wife adjacent to me. I took off my glasses and rubbed a hand over my eyes. “Yes of course, what’s the problem?” I asked, knowing the answer already.
Our kitchen was small and comfortable with pots and pans hanging from a rack over the sink and a tidy dishwasher crammed into the far corner. It had wooden floors and so much artwork from our little girls it seemed as though Crayola had decided to use our house for a commercial. There were school books lying on the floor, and a suit jacket thrown over the back of my chair. The briefcase was by the door, resting less than contentedly against the wall. It was typical; it was the house of a family who works hard, pays their taxes, and was fundamentally ignored by the Government. It was American.
My wife pushed papers into my hand, one after another, each one filled with baffling black scratches and indecipherable meaning. I rubbed my hands over my face, trying to find some purpose in the life I chose to live, the goals I accomplished, and the goals I didn’t. Both weighed equally in my mind. I once heard that I was the sum of all things that I had done, but I have always humbly disagreed. I was more than that. More than the man who was never quite good enough at his nine to five job. More than the man who would stand in lines on platform twenty for the 6:03 train. More than the man who was slammed out of the corner office, pink slip crumpling in his hand. I was the dreams I forgot to reach for, the aspirations I could never hope to achieve, the impossibilities I laughed at in my naiveté. I pushed my chair back slightly and my wife’s hand fell on my own. Holding me in place, she forced me to crane my neck to look around the wall and through the curtain to take just one more look at my children before I was pulled back down. I could just see the corner of the blinds ruffling in the wind and smell the freshly cut grass, maybe even hear the tinkle of a boy’s laughter before being pulled back down.
Bank statements, income checks, CD’s, tax receipts, a blood-red tide of the rolling current of life throwing itself against the black foundation of my effort. I felt it crumbling beneath my grasp as I riffled through each piece of paper, clutching them for so long that I would leave wet thumbprints along the edges. My wife too, head hunched over, bore my burden under no shame of her own. Tough times. Tough times don’t even begin to describe the bus I’ve found myself under. ‘We’ve been experiencing some tough times’ is such a hollow expression. It doesn’t amount to the fear I see in my wife’s eyes, the trembling rolling shame I’m feeling in my stomach, the absolute and complete sense of inadequacy and failure whenever I see my children’s faces. I cannot stand to go shopping anymore; my wife has to do it for me, because I cannot accept myself when I am forced to say no. Turn away. Cutting coupons and rationing supplies, splurging once, maybe two too many times… I am not having a tough time, I am drowning in a world that asks too much of me, and I never had enough to give.
Hours passed like moments, and I heard a crack of thunder echo from outside and the children scream in mock fear. How exhausting it must have been, to live at that age, where every wonder existed just behind the next curtain, just around the bend. I remember the days when I was a child, back when life seemed so easy; it’s disheartening really, to reminiscence about that form of life. Now life seems to drip through every second like syrup on pancakes, sweet but ultimately destructive.
I looked over at my wife, at the utter truth of the matter. Debt, mortgage, bankruptcy are all such foolish words, foolish but ringing with such significant finality that my life seems to condense down upon them. For years, I had labored under the oppressive dictation of society to provide for my family, put a roof over their head, dinner on the table. I got an American job, a little person in a big corporation with just the smallest chance of changing things. When I graduated from college I had such hope, a future that I thought I could look forward to. Life seemed mine for the taking, yet here I was, facing eviction, foreclosure, bankruptcy. It wasn’t my fault.
It is not my fault.
My wife looked at me with desperation, a tear falling sleepily on the desk, simplifying the words to blurs, the documents to pieces of paper. I grabbed her hand and squeezed, before pushing back my chair and wandering backwards. Slipping out of the kitchen and down the stairs, leaving my wife desperately searching for an answer in the pages of a book, I left the house. Opening the door and walking out into the summer afternoon. I walked on towards disaster. My two little ones were left playing in the road, the rest of the business men had gone home tired and they were all that remained. The bright sun had been obscured by great grey clouds, a crack of thunder echoed through the sky and down through my bones.
  I wandered out into the street, stepping over houses and pictures of people, and one sign that said ‘Home.’ A whole city, I was a little shocked and taken out of myself at the grandness of their chalk creation. A whole world condensed down into a small stretch of black asphalt, the greens and blue standing in bright contrast to the dark black of the street. I laughed aloud when I saw they’d used the two yellow lines dividing the street to make the city’s road. Children built an empire in one infinite afternoon. It really is quite something, to see how the world can be summarized in the stretch of a child’s city. Life, perhaps, cannot be quantified in a child’s picture but, then again, maybe that’s all it is.
The storm clouds clapped again overhead, and I took my two little girls under my arms, their hair draping over my wrists. I looked up at the sky just as the first tear drops of rain cascaded downward, slapping onto my face and mingling with my own. I took the girls up the drive and watched as they disappeared through the door, my wife swinging them up into her arms. Not caring about the rain on the hard wood floors. It doesn’t matter now, does it?
I turned back, my hand on the door, one last time, to look at their city. The houses and the building mixed and tumbled with the onslaught of rain. The downpour soaked through the walls and washed away the windows. What once was made and firm was now just dirty lines across the pavement. I felt a twinge of sympathy, almost guilt, at the thought of a world being suddenly lost. In the end, it all washed away, the house down the drain, the job trickling down the street, the office just a ruddy blur.
I turned back around, left the drowning city, and found my family waiting for me.