can Mary come out and play?

I've been dreaming of relay races.

I am not sure when we stopped playing. There are groups of adults who do, but it feels so rare. The kickball league here and there. But the priority for the whole practice of physical interaction seems to have disappeared. We grow up. Terrible thing to do really. We stop playing with each other. We rarely, mostly never really, play anymore. It was once a daily ritual, the hour of recess. It had its ups and downs, but it was where we learned to interact.

Now I see people hop around a barroom like it was a schoolyard. We are missing the schoolyard. We substitute relationships with facebook or text messages. We sit around for hours running our mouths and drinking poison. I like poison. But I can't help but wonder if as a child I would have been impressed, doubtful. I always dreamt of being independent to do all the fun things I cared to. My independence finds me missing a great deal of what a child would call fun.

A major pursuit in my life is honoring the Lost Boy in all of us and refusing to leave Neverland. Faith, trust and a little fairy dust. I know it gets me a reputation of odd, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I hope it doesn't make me seem irresponsible. That couldn't be further from the truth or my intention. There is more to life than all of the burdens we have, there's a great and never ending amount of joy we forget to see and fail to realize.

People have kids and fall in love with play again. I want to play now. I want to have a relay race around the circle of my school and a pickup game of footie. I want to ride bikes and play hide and go seek. I want to get paint on my hands and make something with a friend. I want to do something for the sake of indulging creativity. I want to see what comes out of the heads of the people I care about.

I want to hear my friends laugh with natural ease and no pretense. I want to not care what I am wearing or if it gets dirty. I want to see the women I hold dear without make-up and the men without their everyday conforming behavior. Remember when it was okay to not be great at whatever the game was and still have fun? I bet we'd all crack under the pressure of being "it." We've forgotten the resiliency of childhood and we haven't heard our friends cheer us on in ages.

I wanna race.