Crossroad

Were all those restraints, all those constraints really there? or were they fleeting tricks of memory like those of the adult hesitant at a crosswalk as though with some throwback: echo of the child so long ago forbidden to cross streets? And yet so many had outgrown their bars, like the concert pianist imprisoned for several years, who on his release, played brilliantly as before, ``because,'' he said, ``there never was a time when I did not practice daily - in my mind.''

Constrained? Held back? Then only by herself: herself, the harshest and most lenient watcher. And within her too, as surely in us all was the part that defied, denied the most Argus-eyed: the part that could not ever be confined.