How Much Comfort

Friday was colloquially the last day though there’s technically another week that only half of them will attend.

The thing I’ll remember most is how it all just kind of ebbed away, different kids going home with people as I didn’t notice or looked at something else, most of them occasionally coming up to me to ask to go to the bathroom and that’s it.

It’s a scene out of an acid trip on celluloid, a hundred of them flailing while laser lights flash and the fog machine pumps it and is this the music they really listen to these days? The poignant observation that this is my life ending–a third? a quarter if I’m particularly enduring? The lights are the only interesting thing here, I say, but I know it’s not true because this is interesting, two dozen kids with slide whistles and scrapbooks mr. Brandon sign my shirt.

We literally found him in the park, my boss says, points at “BBoy Zen” walking in the door to breakdance in a circle of them all, some tribal sideshow the kids go apeshit over. Did you pay him I ask and understand it doesn’t even matter, he’s standing there with a crayola marker stuck in his teeth as the kids worship him and have him sign anything they own, his two minute performance the only background they need to understand this is shit that don’t just fall off the welfare truck.

Earlier in the day I’m talking about their values like what’a a kid got in life. What can you take from a child that doesn’t have parents? These are the simple things, their future ice cream, their future pizza, their opportunities to have fun. They cherish these temporary joys, perhaps the purest kids have before they can even know it, separated from dollars and relationships and the law and their brains and depressions, enjoyment–no strings attached. And I can’t even find myself capable of taking anything from them anymore because it’s like that, what do they really have left? What do I have any right to snatch away from them? One girl loses her mind over not being able to sit on the tire swing for literally ten minutes, full-on breakdown, and I tell her listen to me you don’t know the half of this.

And these are our last moments, the kids and I, and who knows how much more they did for me than I did for them, I wonder as they shovel ice cream marshmallows and whipped cream into their mouths and their parents and grandparents and brothers and uncles and aunts and everyone who’s stuck with them who maybe learned to like their company just a little bit anyway grabs their lunchboxes and crayons and pulls them out the door.