Change

It was always the boys and I who were sat on the swings, trying to go as high as we could go. I was five and they were eight and ten - young cousins trying to outdo each other on the playground. Every now and then, someone would go running home in a flood of tears with an injury of some form. But despite each fall, each scrape, each bruise we still went back to the park to play competition again. Ten, eight and five, we were. Ten. Eight. And five.

The humid days in the park soon became a past we no longer talked about. We were now twenty, twenty-three and twenty-five. Days spent in office erased all recollection of the events of our childhood. Only on the rainy weekends spent indoors would I remember the days when the cousins and I played on the swings. I wondered if they remembered it as fondly as I and wondered if they thought about the past on gloomy days in the Australian outback just as I did on wintry days in the English countryside.

There was never much communication between us since we parted ways. They left for university long before I did and never really came back. I caught them during the small slivers of time we spent together, but the stories we could share soon dwindled and we were left with nothing much to say. Gone were the days in the park when we laughed, screamed, cried - perhaps, they were never meant to be relived over the Christmas dinner chat. Now dressed smartly in our work clothes (or at least I would like to think I dressed smartly), we left it all behind and all that's left is the acknowledgement that much has changed and that we could never revert back to the childhood we once had  fifteen years before.