When I was a child I loved playing games. Not that big of a surprise as most children love games, but it is true none the less.
I was also the kind of child who enjoyed winning. Playing a game was like being given a bowl of ice cream, while winning made it a bowl of my favorite flavor, with sprinkles.
Everyone knows sprinkles make ice cream ten times better.
One day after being abandoned by our parents to a painful world of education, that is to say, after kindergarten one day, my friends and I decided to play hide and go seek while waiting for our parents to pick us up.
I loved hide and go seek, why? I was fast. Should that really matter in a game of hiding? No, not really. Did it? Yes. This is because even as a young child I was learning the ways of our legal system, exploiting loopholes. The poor soul unlucky enough to be chosen as “it” began his fateful count to a hundred; the rest of us scampered about.
This is where the loophole comes in.
A problem with small children playing games is that unless rules are asked for they are never explained. What this meant for me is that boundaries did not exist. We never mentioned them, we don’t have them. So by my logic if I ran really fast for one hundred seconds no one would find me.
Running for so long sure was hard but the thought of those hypothetical sprinkles was oh so hypothetical and oh so delicious. After what I assumed to be something like one hundred seconds I needed somewhere to hide.
Jumping into a nearby inconspicuous bush I settled, planning to wait out the game, my plan was perfect.
Scratch that, my plan was horridly flawed. I was so far away I could not even hear my friends to keep me on edge/ to know when the game was over.
Slowly poisonous thoughts entered my mind…
“is the game over yet?”
“What if I’ve already won?”
“What if that’s just what they want me to thing and are secretly waiting for me right now with a cheetah!?”
“They would get a cheetah… Just to catch me…”
Having a hyperactive imagination aside I was getting quite bored. Soon I even found myself daring to leave the safety of my bush for the outside world.
The real issue was that I did not want to go back yet.
But I was bored my mind needed stimulation.
This is about the time things started to go downhill
And that ladies and gentlemen is called foreshadowing.
I was not a stupid mind you; no part of me thought I could skateboard. But I could look awesome pretending to skateboard. This very quickly devolved into an adorable child version of myself, as I was very adorable at the time, trying desperately to look awesome.
Ultimately I was closer to imitating surfboarding.
This held my attention for a shocking whole two minutes. After which, and this is the special part, I wanted to get off the skateboard. Stepping off my foot landed on its side. This is that sort of step that twists your ankle if you put all your weight on it. The typical reaction to this is to stumble forward saving yourself from an injured ankle. When I stepped I stumbled not forward but circularly, yea work that over in your mind.
I was then standing backwards on the skateboard feeling quite proud of myself. You know the funny part about stumbling? It is a force of momentum that if you say applied to the wheels of a skateboard just standing around may cause that skateboard to move.
I soon found myself falling quite quickly down a terribly steep hill backwards on a skateboard. How I did not notice I was playing with a skateboard on a massive hill of doom and death is a question I still ask myself. Needless to say I freaked out a little bit.
I understood that this was bad, this was very bad. I also understood how amazing it was that I did not slip off at any given moment to my assumed death. This hill was so long however that my mind slowly had time to cool down from its state of complete panic. I recall just looking over my shoulder and thinking “This is amazing!” when I discovered a large rock in my path.
I woke up later with a general sense that something was wrong. I gave a little mental groan, I felt like a computer rebooting. I was in the grass, somehow, and everything was wet. I thought this was just the dew on the grass. Opening my eyes was a challenge but soon I found myself looking out at a red tinted world. I instantly understood that something was wrong, I’d hurt my eyes, I needed to get back.
I tried to get up,
But that was not working so well.
My motor skills were shot; nothing was working as it should. Fortunately I kept a cool and collected mind. “Everything was going to be ok,” I told myself. I just needed to get back. My calm mental demeanor was sadly askew. Outside of my mind I was screaming my head off; some shock from head trauma keeping my knowledge of this quiet. I just figured I could not talk.
I did finally get up somehow, slowly beginning the trek back. Still nothing was working. My best attempt at movement was no less than a zombie lurch.
Those houses had better have all been abandoned because as I painfully lurched by no one came to my rescue. I mean yes if I saw a young zombie child covered in blood goring up the sidewalk, while screaming his head off, I would be scared too.
I did make it back to the house. My friends had retired long before from hide and go seek, so I approached with only a sweeping wind as company. I neared my final obstacle, the front door.
Well first the stairs up to the door. All my motor skills to raise my legs were gone, let alone balance which had effectively forsaken me. My whole being had the only purpose of getting into the house, nothing else mattered. By sheer willpower I climbed, with muscles long torn asunder, to the door.
All I needed to do was turn the knob… turn the knob… turn the bloody knob! (Huh, I just realized how ironic saying that is.) My hands slid on the door like they were covered in finger-paint, actually my blood. I couldn’t aim. The door was so close but all I could do was flail at it miserably.
Statistically speaking if you keep trying you are bound to succeed. This is how I explain machine guns, blindly eating jellybeans, most music playing bands, and how I finally grabbed the doorknob.
The door swung inward easily and I soon felt the shudder of adult footsteps coming towards me. Mind you I had no idea I was screaming. So when a friend’s mother showed up I was simply glad she had psychic powers.
I’m pretty sure she screamed, not that I could hear. Then we both sort of wobbled and collapsed. I’m told we passed out, which explains the gap in my memory.
Though I’m under the impression I passed out first.
It turns out my eyes were fine; lying around in a pool of my blood just covered them in a film of red. My cuts and scrapes, though plentiful, were all something a week or two could mend. The real problem was my tongue. I had cut my tongue in half. Not the snake way, but horizontally. I was left with a wicked scar across my tongue that kept me company for years and years of my life. When I crash landed my tongue had been sticking out past my teeth. My head colliding with the ground caused me to close my mouth rather violently, and thus all the blood.
