Playroom

By: Alicia O'Keefe

A child’s playroom is a magical place, a place where kids can escape into their own world filled with toys that behave like more. A stick can become a wand, a blanket can become a cape, pieces of molded plastic can come together to form a gourmet meal. My sister and I are fortunate enough to have our very own in our basement. It is filled with toys, costumes, and possibilities. It is here, in this wonderland, with these glorious trinkets, where my sister and I spend all our time. In this wonderful place, even we change; one second, we are us, the next we are anyone else. Here, we have been princesses, fairies, police officers, and astronauts.

On this particular day, we decided to pretend we were “big kids,” the kind who went to high school and switched classrooms every period. The idea felt impossibly glamorous to us. In reality, we were still in elementary school, stuck in the same dim classroom all day, surrounded by desks that were only desks and books that were only books. High school, in our minds, was extraordinary. So, we imagined ourselves walking confidently through its halls instead of clinging to adults because crossing the street alone still felt terrifying.

We played like this for hours, suspended in a world where time didn’t seem to move and nothing could go wrong. But that illusion shattered in our make‑believe math class, when my sister suddenly stopped pretending. She looked up at me with fear in her eyes and whispered, “It’s happening again.”

Even in our fantasy world, we were still just kids, and this was a kind of problem no child could handle alone. Her pale face and quiet tears told me everything. She was having another seizure. They were subtle, nothing like the dramatic convulsions shown in movies. If she didn’t tell you, you might never know. That subtlety made them even more frightening. The seizures were caused by a dark, soul‑sucking tumor growing in her brain, a shadow first discovered on an MRI scan.

I sprinted upstairs to find help. My mother rushed to my sister’s side, soothing her with promises that everything would be okay. She was right, eventually, physically, things would be okay. But first, the darkness had to be cut out of her.

She spent only two days in the hospital after her surgery, though to me it felt like an eternity. I stayed with my grandparents, trying to live normally while knowing my world existed in that playroom, and that its magic only worked when my sister was there with me. My best friend was lying in a hospital bed, undergoing a procedure that could save her life or take it away.

Part of me wished I were older, like the high schoolers we pretended to be. Maybe then my family would have trusted me with the truth. Maybe they would have let me visit her more than once. But another part of me was relieved. Seeing her bruised, stitched‑up head and her small body swallowed by hospital sheets was almost unbearable.

I wasn’t the one with the tumor, yet I wished I could have taken her place. I wanted to pull her out of that nightmare, to carry her pain so she wouldn’t have to. Only then, I thought, would I know for certain that the suffering was over. But life isn’t perfect, not even in a playroom.

A child’s playroom is a magical place, or at least it was. Now it serves only as a reminder. A reminder of a time I can only dream to forget. The horrible, marvelous place that was our playroom does not exist anymore, neither do many of the memories that were made there, but this one, will stay with me forever. Watching my sick sister suffer with an illness that could only have been placed in her head by the devil himself, watching her choke and cry as she tried to swallow pills that would help ease her seizures, and seeing symptoms that still trap her in the past arising even over a decade later, made me, and still makes me, sick to my stomach.

My heart goes out to all those families out there who left the hospital without their loved ones, those kids who spend their lives in pain and hooked up to machines, to every individual who had to say goodbye too early. I hope that all those who were lost are somewhere as sensational as a playroom, free from pain, free from fear, exploring new worlds with the same boundless imagination my sister and I once shared.