There was a small, beaten up keyboard standing in one of the corners of the gated-in cement area; it stood on a playstage, next to a dilapidated plastic playhouse. The kids put on little shows on the stage, or sat on its edge to be lectured, or used it as a vaulting point to make a slam dunk into the basketball goal.
The kids. Some of them were loud, and talked, filled every space with talking, and screamed with glee when given a gift. They made up new rules to games, and new games, and new ways of playing old games. And though not particularly destructive, toys became worn and broken after only a few hours. Because nothing belonged to any one person. Everything was to be shared among all, and all wanted to get as much use out of whatever they had before someone else got it, and they never saw it again.
That's almost how I was treated. Like I was about to leave any second, never to return again; that it was crucial they get as much from and out of me as quick as possible. And they realized what I wasn't thinking about: that, yes, soon I would be going away forever.
Some of the kids only stared, or acted as if they didn't notice me. Some clutched a solitary doll, stayed in one spot for hours, playing at the rickety dollhouse, never venturing to look up or say a word or call one of the other children.
Everything. All of it to take in. Each child, each life had myriad swirling behaviors, motives and fears, things to forget, things to learn, and it was too much to try to understand, or guess, from faces and tones of voices in a foreign language.
The only feeling -- the only thought and action and reality there -- being engendered by the hugeness, and the littleness of their value of self, was love. It was the only possibility. In their singing of a song for me, or desperately wanting to help with my cleaning, asking repeatedly to be able to hold the hose "only one minute, just one minute," practically prying my camera from my fingers and taking as many photos possible of as many things as possible in as little time as possible, drenching me with the hose ("Mojado!"), forcing me at risk of fist to climb up the air conditioning unit onto the roof to scavenge for a missing ball, (finding four balls, three toy cars, a boomerang...), teaching me hand games, trading vulgar insults in Spanish ... In everything, only love.
The brown-red clay staining the world and the heat and brightness of the sun bleaching the world melted everything into a light brown. Our clothes. The walls and floors. The little keyboard in the corner. Stay there long enough and your heart will turn brown.
I and a few others were painting mint green, a bedroom. Somehow, within the strange meanderings and branches of long conversation, Coldplay came up. That our favorite songs were "The Scientist" and "Yellow". And "Clocks," of course. Maybe it was Amelia that said "One day I want to learn it on piano."
And I saw that keyboard out on the porch-like cement area from the second story window. It was browned and battered, didn't work, maybe never had worked, and was just for kids' imaginations.
I imagined playing "Clocks" on it. Having all the children gathered around it. Teaching them.
But I had to leave them.
I remember... taking reluctantly their sole stuffed animal or plastic-beaded bracelet as a remembrance, only because not doing so would crush hearts. Sally writing her name in red permanent marker on all my team, somewhere on our bodies, so we wouldn't forget her. Marching away as steadily and necessarily as required, but leaving my real self back on the gated cement, the padlocked, chained orphanage. Their house that could never be a home.
Shut myself in the van. As it began down the driveway, took pictures from the rear window. They clung to the fence. None of my team spoke much as the van steadily, steadily distanced itself from the place.
And I. Steadily, steadily had to figure out how to distance my heart and sever the magnetic pull.
