There’s a boy, about three feet tall, in a dusty, green shirt a size too big, and gray shorts a size too small. His light-up shoes bling with each step as he scampers away from his mother, busy chatting with another lady.
Through the window spanning the wall, I watch the boy slip outside the door. He wiggles his way into the small car, plastered with cartoonish characters on its plastic doors and plastic tires. The boy peers over through the gaping car window. There, a small girl giggles in her shaking car, alive with excitement as her parents gush over her, taking pictures and cooing.
The boy absently fingers at the coin slot in his car and then scrambles away, out of my vision.
I turn to find his mom in the restaurant. That’s when I notice another boy, this one about three-and-a-half feet tall. He’s wearing a grayish-blue shirt. It matches his eyes, which are open wide, so I can see the whites on all sides of his pupils. His lips are parted in a slack-jaw way; I can tell his mind is running faster than his flitting fingers drumming the table. I follow his eyes. I see the car where the boy in the green shirt had been sitting a minute ago.
The same boy then comes running from another side of the restaurant to his mother. She’s wearing tight clothing, and her nails were probably done just a few days ago. She’s looking at me.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was people-watching people being people—now the people were people-watching me. It was easy to get lost in the way the world is, and it was easy to forget where I am amidst it all.
The mother of the boy in the green shirt must have felt the same way because when I looked into her caramel eyes again, she blinked and averted her gaze as if she had been caught in something she felt like an outsider to. But neither of us were outsiders here. We both were present in the world, and it just took each other to realize it.
I look back over to the boy in the gray shirt. His eyes are as wide as ever, caught in a trance, locked on the boy in green. If only the latter would quit running to watch each new kid come and go on the play area and find the eyes of the boy in the gray, the two looking for playmates and watching it all, but neither meeting and neither actually living their dreams.
