This is where I need to be, right here where the sun is shining and the air is warm – just warm enough — and the breeze kicks up to blow stray pieces of hair against my field of vision, distorting the world in a haze of red and brown.

This is where I need to be, right now when kids are hollering and screeching in delight and it drowns out the beating of my own heart for the moment – just the moment – so I wonder if I exist or if it’s merely some blend of metaphysical being.

I press the toe of my shoe against the mulch and begin to rock, serenely, calmly, closing my eyes and feeling my body move in rhythm, in rhyme. And suddenly I can hear my heart beating again, as I knew it would. As I know it should.

Rock forward, one beat. Rock backward, one beat. I slip off my heels and they fall to the ground, kicking up a small cloud of dust. I stretch out my legs, pointing my stockinged toes, and relish the breeze as I lean back.

“What are you doing?”

One beat.

“I’m swinging.”

One beat.

She’s a little red-haired girl with freckles across her nose, staring at me from the next swing. She squints against the sunlight and scrunches up her nose the way kids do when they’re thinking – slow and deliberate. I drop my legs, letting the momentum ease.

“How come?”

“I guess I just felt like it,” I say kindly, though I can’t force as smile. This moment isn’t for that.

I can sense her studying me – my blouse, my dress pants, my fallen high heels. I look every bit the businesswoman and yet I feel every bit not.

“But you’re a grown up,” she says finally.

One beat. Just one.

I look towards my car parked in the lot among the minivans and SUVs and I suddenly want to switch cars, switch lives, with anyone here. I loathe the thought of getting into that car, of pulling out of that space, of making this moment a memory.

I’m here now. It’s where I want to be. It’s where I need to be if I want even a chance of remembering that my heart is still strong.

One beat.

I kick off again, pressing my toe against the earth as the rhythm starts again.

“Not really.”

And I look over and offer a grin, and she returns it with a sunny smile. And then we’re leaning back into the wind as we both race to reach what we’re after.