Skate Parks

1.

There was this game about a skate park. I think there was also one about a BMX course, but the one that I haunt is the skate park.

The game was called Touchgrind Skate 2. You might remember it; it was kind of popular fourteen years ago, but I played it in the afterglow when I was nine or ten. You'd pilot a little skateboard around a skate park. I haven't looked at the game in about eight years. But I can picture the park perfectly.

There was a bowl covered in moss and dirt, with a bent and rusted beam leading down into it. A couple of wispy pixel trees stood in sad patches of grass, surrounded by dirty concrete. Near them, wooden skate ramps stood creaky and disheveled.

At the far end of the park, there was a parking garage lit by dim, warm lights. You could skate over the cars if you wanted; they were already broken and dented from years of the same treatment.

You had a Polaroid camera so that you could easily take pictures of no one.

2. 

I played Touchgrind Skate 2 on my dad's iPhone. If I got bored at a restaurant, I'd ask to play Skate and then hide away in the dusty light of that perpetual digital afternoon. I'd lie in the middle of the bowl and soak the sunlight into my skin. Then the food would come, and I'd put the phone away.

Being totally empty save for the player, the skate park couldn't be fun forever. When I'd rolled over every car and photographed every nook and cranny of the park, I drifted away. My skateboard sat upturned in the bowl, waiting for me in the ones and zeros like a good mechanical dog.

Social media was a new and exciting fad back then; Facebook accounts were intriguing, mystical things that big kids and parents had. Twitter and YouTube were skate parks in their own right, except they were crawling with other people to skate with. People would teach you new tricks, or people would laugh at you when you fell. I wasn't quite sure how it worked.

Last summer, long after I had abandoned the skate park, my cell phone was rendered useless after I went swimming with it in my pocket. I thought it would be no big deal.

But that night, as I lay in bed with nothing to distract me, I realized that for the first time in about half a decade, I was alone. I found myself drifting off to that skate park and settling in with the weeds.

3.

I actually lied to you before. I can't picture the skate park perfectly. When I googled pictures of the game to double-check, I was surprised to find images of a bright, sterile bowl with a glimmering beam leaning into it. The wooden ramps and parking garage (with perfectly intact cars) were both totally separate maps. The trees were picture-perfect. It was just my mind decaying it.

The skate park was never real enough to age. I never actually lay in it or pressed the button on the Polaroid camera. That was only neurons firing in my brain, fighting against the fact that it wasn't real and never could be real.

What will other spaces look like when nobody uses them? Will trees sprout out of piles of deleted Snapchat messages? Will animals burrow in the little plus-sign post buttons after nobody uses them?

Or will they just stay the same?