I’m having trouble arriving today. I’m lying down on the ground near the riverbank, but I’m not all the way there. 

I open my eyes, try again.

I’m right outside one of the huts. I peer through the slats. I hope no one is inside. I prefer this place to be unpopulated. 

I see no one. Just because I don’t see anyone doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Ghost towns are often full of life, even if their streets are empty.

I sit on the ground with my back against the wood.

I am here, I say, as always. I am listening.

No one comes.

I look across the river. I see the spot where I sit most days. 

She is lucky, I think, to have that place.

I tear up with gratitude. I also feel the blending of the recent past with the near future, the continuum of mes; as I sit here, I sit there too. 

Something moves, low to the ground. A little boy, younger than the girl I’ve seen here. Pre-verbal, perhaps. He sneaks in a crouch around the circumference of the hut next to mine. Playing hide and seek. His face is locked in determination. 

Hi, I say.

He doesn’t respond. He only stays in his crouch.

I wait and watch.

He waits and watches.

It occurs to me he knows something I don’t. I shift position. Now I am crouching too.

I catch a glint in his eye. Now you’re getting it, it seems to say.

We are Mischief.

Without a signal for me to follow, he breaks for the field ahead. I am too slow to react. I’m stuck in my crouch by my hut, stuck in the glory of an honorary membership I hadn’t fully earned, yet I still see the glee on his face as he dashes away. I stay on that image, even as I reflexively curse my creaky limbs for not even giving it a go.

I no longer see him. I don’t know where he is hiding.

Soon enough, I stand and follow. As I walk towards the field, I laugh. Now I am his It, the one seeking the hider. I’m nearly certain I won’t find him, whether because he knows this land far better than I do, or whether he simply vanished like the others. 

For a moment, I was his _________. 

My brain gets in the way, tripping on what word to use. I hate “partner in crime,” it says. What’s the word I want? Conspirator? No, accomplice.

But “accomplice” pulls me out of the field, into the world with faceful people whose names I recognize, to find that synonym. Words are triggers. Too many of them pull me away from the present, to traumatic pasts or dreaded futures.

The boy didn’t speak, maybe didn’t even have words yet. I wonder if that was his lesson.

Remove the words. Stay here right now.