Capture the flag, 1982. My camp group has been divided, and each team is defending its flag. Ours is up on a hill, well-protected and armed with vigilant warriors and the strongest and fastest. Some use sheer brawn to prevent any raiders, others sit so close to the flag that an invader would have to touch them in order to grab it and make a run for it.
I am fast, one of the fastest on our team, but sit silently. Listening. I don’t offer suggestions for our strategy. There are always loud voices that like to hear themselves talk and are not open to collaboration. They expect others to follow orders directly, certain that there is no other plan but their own. I watch, stare into the woods where we are playing, clock opponents hiding and gathering behind trees or other structures. I can see they have a plan to take one of ours on the right, two on one, and that another is planning to run right up the middle.
The thing about Capture the Flag is that whoever gets the other team’s flag and makes it back to base first wins. Both teams could be reaching at the same time and then it becomes a test of speed and agility and good planning. I always chose to play it stealthily. I seemed disinterested to both my team and the other. It was my cover.
I learned to be stealth, hide my hand from the manipulators and narcissists early on. Anything that might be important to me, give me joy was kept well under the radar. I learned how to walk between the lines of other people’s narratives, skirt around the edges of their grandiose tales of themselves and their largesse, or their undeserved suffering. There are some for whom winning the suffering Olympics is just a warmup, playing scales for how their “wall of sound” will dominate your soft guitar. There will never be anyone, anywhere who has it worse, and it is wise to consider building an internal wall.
The endless talking, distracting with questions, the barrage of energy sent your way to wear you down, and make you compliant. I have had good practice. I’d watch the trees and discover movement before anyone started running and would drop to the ground. When I caught sight of a teammate in the wild, I’d signal, ‘you go, I will hang back,’ and did. I’d tell them where the hiders were, where they would find safety. See them get close and once confidently on their own, I’d continue.
I am listening to Creep by Radiohead on repeat as I piece together choreography for my dance class.
I want you to notice when I’m not around
So fuckin’ special, I wish I was special1
I have considered all the ways in which this song has been used to define the fringe, the periphery of a social scene or community, pining, unrequited love, pleas for attention and affection.
I have taken it into my body so that the movement, dance works itself out, and it has inevitably taken me to places in my memory that are hard to sit with. Considering the spaces of stillness where I have chosen to remain immobile and those in which I am frozen. The places where I have watched, eyes wide open, and those where I have folded into myself.
There is something overwhelming and exciting in running from and also courting danger. When one is captured, he/she/they are brought to the home base of their captors where they wait until they are set free by being tagged by one of their own team members. That means that someone makes a run for the imprisoned and either grabs the flag on the way out or sacrifices the proximity to victory for the release of the captured. A concentration of defenders surrounds the prize, willing to thwart theft and the loss of their reign at all costs. It gets violent here.
Standing at the bottom of the hill, I decide to make a move. I am watching the action unfold in front of me, see defendants and opponents meet one another match for match. They are not expecting me to make a run for it, aren’t really paying much attention to my movement, assume I know better than to try to outrun some of the fast players now running wild on the way to the flag. I don’t hide from tree to tree, instead go straight up the middle, counting on my speed and the surprise to take me straight up. I know that once they see me running, my team will block anyone coming for me.
Just as I suspected I see them all fall into formation. I am running up the middle, my heart beating up in my ears, my senses keen, adrenaline pushing me. I see all of the players in the holding pen, arms outstretched and eye the flag across from them. I am not close enough to tag them and grab the flag and must make a decision. Slapping as many hands as I can, I set them all free before I am grabbed. I am sweaty and out of breath and have a strange taste in my mouth. I’ve been captured but there are now more soldiers available to reformulate a plan.
Looking down the hill at our team working its way up, I consider the vantage point of our enemies. Our flag still waved atop the other hill, players are fanned from one end to the other, voices are carrying from all directions.
“You should have grabbed the flag.”
“I didn’t think I’d make it back. Someone else will get it.”
When the flag is captured, the game is over, and everyone is freed. It’s pretty intense for a little while there and slowly we regulate, return to stasis. I begin the retreat almost immediately, folding in, curling my arm around my paper, unable to share the answers. Unsure if the answers are right for anyone but me.
The sensations of hiding behind the trees, grabbing the bark with my hands, peeling it back with my fingers, inhaling the scent of pine, feeling the sap under my nails, breathing rapidly, heart fluttering reminds me of the space between the walls of before and after hiding from the predatory. They know if you are preparing to run, if you will freeze or fawn or fight. They size you up in the breaths. I knew it was better to cover myself in pine needles.
Saturn eats his children and people starving for attention or affection or a chokehold on your light will attempt to devour you, first with sweets and charm. Hoping you will fall for their machinations. They can be seductive in their familiarity, enticing in their promises, the long-lost Anastasia somehow escaped and returned to close the wound of your loneliness. You’ve found a sister or a lover or a partner, the gold fill to your broken bowl.
Another time we played, I chose the flag. Looked at my teammates, the captors and told them I was sure I could make it back. The rules did not permit hiding the flag, so when I tore down the hill, flag flapping in the pocket of my shorts, it appeared as though I were setting the entire forest on fire. The flag was bright orange, like a traffic cone, and it waved at my side as I dashed down and then up the other hill back to our home base. My legs were burning and without realizing it, I’d begun screaming, fighting my way back.
I have no idea how it is that no one caught me, but found myself on top of the hill, my enemy’s flag in hand, completely out of breath, hands resting on my knees, panting.
The next year I’d be too cool for games. We all would be. I’d retreat into a new body; one I didn’t recognize when I stared for hours in the mirror. The girls on my team would start liking boys. The only games they’d want to play in the woods would be kissing games and I had no expectation any of them would want to kiss me, and I didn’t want to kiss them either but would have if they wanted to. I flew further under the radar until mine was a ghost plane like Wonder Woman’s.
I looked up to the hill, seeing the formations and shadows, branches and rocks that blocked the way to the best place to protect one’s flag. Girls I knew would push the boys in the chest and then turn away embarrassed and then walk right back and touch the same spot again. The boys would pretend it hurt, then pull their hands back onto their chests and everyone would blush. I didn’t think I wanted to play those games. But I did want someone to want to play them with me.
I curled my hand over my paper so no one could see, and I started to draw, sometimes looking up to see what they were all up to now.
1993 Radiohead song, Creep. Songwriters: Mike Hazlewood, Albert Louis Hammond, Edward John O'brien, Thomas Edward Yorke, Philip Selway, Jonathan Greenwood, Colin Greenwood. For non-commercial use only.