The Playground Incident

When my twin brother and I were growing up, most of the advice we got from adults was bad , even harmful. Many poor examples were set. ( I could open a can of beer before I could tie my shoes-this was before the advent of pull-tabs and pop-tops)
The world that my first adults lived in was a dangerous and unpredictable place; utterly unsuitable for children and "grown-ups" alike.
Chaos reigned. Car crashes and body counts. LSD and stupid Maoist hippies. PBR and homicidal Confederate bikers.
There was also a war being fought overseas, which made life even more perilous for the adults, who sometimes just disappeared and stayed that way. One kid I knew in first grade lost his dad but wouldn't admit it-he just said his daddy "was so" coming home.
The adults told me otherwise, so one day at recess I told the kid that everyone knew his daddy died in the war, so he should stop lying.
That was the first time I'd ever seen someone destroyed by grief.
I've hated myself ever since then.
I don't even remember the kid's name, just the sight of him- curled up on the playground asphalt with his arms around his knees; his mouth so impossibly large and red that it seemed to swallow his face- as if his entire skull were opening and closing noiselessly, just a barely audible strangling "aaaaaaaaaaaa" sound.
It was the death-cry of his lost, last desperate hope, the agonized end of his innocence, of everything in his not-a-kid-anymore world.
It was my fault.
A pair of teachers ran over, looking worried. At first they thought I had hit him ( he was at least twice my size) but soon realized that something was seriously wrong. One teacher carried him inside.
I never saw him again.
Maybe no one did.
I told one of the teachers what happened. She looked angry, then very sad, sad looking like people on TV, except she was right there, big and scary sad.
She started crying and hugging me. I didn't know why. It wasn't her daddy after all, and I wasn't her kid. I just stood there.
I've hated myself ever since then.
Looking back, I try to understand her sad-beyond-sorrow pain. Was she crying because she had also lost someone in that war? Was it empathy for the stricken child? Or was it horror that I, at the age of five, knew exactly what KIA meant, yet had absolutely no idea of what death does to the living?
I'll never know.
I don't remember when it started, but at some long ago point I started feeling a lot like that broken boy. I didn't look like him or act like him, but inside I was a deafening, silent scream; crying for all reasons and confusing it for no reason, or worse, the wrong reason. Or something. Don't ask me to explain the parts of me that are so dark that even I can't see them.
Some things are better left hidden.
More recently, I feel more akin to the weeping teacher than to the grieving child. Maybe there doesn't have to be any ONE thing that sets off the tear bomb, maybe it's just a long, cumulative process and a sudden calamitous result, like long years of snow and one transient, transcendent moment of avalanche. But snow can also be beautiful and it never really melts forever, so I keep going on, season after season, because I know that while each day may very well be my last, tomorrow may also be the first day of Spring, regardless of what the calendar says.
I hope it snows this winter.