The swing set is abandoned and rusted, nestled into an unkempt hill besides an equally decrepit seesaw and lopsided bench. It’s kind of new to me, even though I moved half a mile away from it and have driven by it day after day for years, but he’s been going there since he was a kid. He told me there had been a preschool or firehouse there or something, but it doesn’t really matter; it’s not majestic, or beautiful, or even secluded. The main road tumbles on by just to the left of the sprawling grass, and at least a dozen kids who go to our school live within a five-minute walk. One even lives right across the street. I guess it’s the chaotic undergrowth of the place, and the perpetual lack of activity within its caves of shrubbery, that drew us there. Whatever it was, the deteriorating playground, the ochre grass, the ruggedness of it all, suited us perfectly, and so we became regulars.

It was the beginning, I think, the first time we went there. It wasn’t our first choice for a place to spend a mosquito-ridden twilight, as its proximity to the river made it a buzzing breeding ground. Usually, we’d camp out in his truck on the grown-over airport, but some wary owner of a property bordering the field had assumed we were just bleary-eyed teenagers there for some herbal relaxation without disturbance. Needless to say, we weren’t about to blaze up in wide-open public property, but we figured leaving quietly was the best way to avoid undergoing misguided interrogation.

The problem might have been more easily solved if we were content just going to the movies, or a party, or even dinner, but there were a few glaring issues. First and foremost, we were usually both broke. He worked a crappy supermarket job and I taught art classes to kids. There are some people who are meant to hone the impressionable minds of youths with care and patience, and I was, am, and never will be one of those people. This in turn generated the crux of the matter: I could really only stand to teach one class a week, at risk of becoming slightly homicidal. He also sort of hated dealing with people on a daily basis and the fact that his boss wouldn’t let him grow a mohawk, so he worked minimal hours and contemplated quitting weekly. Anyway, besides our constant lack of usable cash, neither of us are particularly sociable. (Clearly). Honestly, that we actually bonded over so many unusual things was a direct product of not having other people to bond over them with. So, with our usually uninhabited haunt ripped from our highly irritable fingertips, he came up with the idea of the antiquated swing set, where he’d once swung back and forth in merry arcs to his heart’s content. We trundled over the potholed back roads to his secret garden of rusting metal and rough, cracked, vaguely leather seats, and strangely enough found some sort of serenity in the midst of a clattering pseudo-interstate and violently suburban neighborhood.

Now, I think he partly chose the place for the irony of it--an innocent, thriving childhood stakeout turned disheveled and shabby, kind of like our lives had--which is so perfectly in character I can’t imagine why I’d never thought of it before. Although, it may be because I’d never really attempted to understand him prior to hours spent on the screechy swings and sitting on the rotted steps by the river. It wasn’t that anything particularly pivotal occurred there, and we didn’t have a beautiful, fateful Shakespearean romance. It was more of a “Dude, Wish You Were Here is my favorite Pink Floyd song too” type of situation. Two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl; that was us, just barely getting by, with all the erratic vigor of two people who’d rather go to the moon and back for each other than face their own bounty of problems. And so, in possibly one of the least glorious places suburbia has to offer, a quiet camaraderie was formed.