Sixteen, but still.
I wavered a moment more. Then I walked to my car. I waved at the parents and a few squares of concrete down the block I waved at the girls.
The two of them together side by side. One a billowing white ghost, the other a black and white convict. One trying making her way while still being invisible; the other bursting, trying to escape her cage.
I didn't say she is totally night blind and may need help in the dark...
But she is sixteen.
And this is a new friendship in a new place.
I didn't want to ruin it.
Alone in my car driving down St. Mary's drive, I dropped the work of a decade of Halloweens spent guiding and protecting her while pretending she was doing it all on her.
I know it seems ridiculous. A Level 10 gymnast with titles on the national stage, a skilled artist, and an award-winning photographer but the kid is legally blind in one eye and low sighted in the other. For me, this was truly the first time I was letting her go into a world without mother strings attached- without history or a label.
The sunset was a burning jack-o-lantern slipping into the salt of the western horizon. I thought about the time she walked off a 4-foot ledge and tore her costume, skinned her knees and split open her lip. The countless number of times she tripped or was knocked over by children she didn't see coming. The painful way she teetered off porches and stumbled down steps. How it seemed every crack in the sidewalk was out to get her.
When I returned a few hours later she was safe inside the home of her new friend. Sitting at a table with candy carefully sorted in piles, ready to trade. I didn't ask her if she had trouble in the dark.
And the next morning I didn't say a word as I closed the extra spaces in her 5 pages of typed notes on the conditioning program the head coach asked her to write for him.
I am learning how to let go of her disability.
Perhaps one day, I will catch up to where she stands.
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