The injury: Basically, imagine what would happen if someone mistook your arm for a block of cheese and tried scraping it with a grater made of asphalt. Also a cracked collar bone, which I suppose could be like a wish bone if we're sustaining my food analogy.
The logic is infallible.
The story: As I've spelled out many times in this oft-forgotten blog of mine, I was overweight in my younger years. The funny thing is, growing up being made fun of for one's weight typically makes a person reach out to a sort of security blanket for comfort - in my case, I always wore jackets. Like many fat kids, I labored under the sad mistaken belief that having a jacket anywhere on my body would somehow take attention away from my massive, heaving ball of gut flesh. What I'm trying to say is that I was that girl from the 90s that always wrapped her jacket around her waist, except it was the late 2000s and I was not, in fact, a slim generation Y girl with questionable taste in fashion, but a formless glob of meat that purportedly contained a Y chromosome somewhere in its unfathomable depths and brought all of men-dom down as a result.
People were...broken back then.
Despite my physical failings, I did have one shining athletic attribute: I had a bicycle, and I would describe my relationship with it as my first foray into the realm of sexuality because I quite literally rode that bitch so hard that I smashed it into pieces (foreshadowing!). Being that my middle school was just under a mile from my house, I would frequently ride my bike there and back, huffing and puffing my sweaty little ass off and somehow deriving enjoyment from it.
One bright April day, just after school had let out, I met up with the unlucky souls that I had designated as my friends and prepared myself for the ride home. Unfortunately for me, the sun had apparently decided that it was an excellent day to fry the state of Colorado off of the planet, and the comforting warmth of my security blanket-jacket had transformed into a monstrous greenhouse that stole the heat from the very air and stuffed it into my fleshy folds. Ashamed as I was of my girthiness, I was even more embarrassed of my tendency to sweat, because one of the things I inherited from my dad was a genetic disorder in which waterspouts grow where my sweat pores should be.
Okay, I finally got the jump rope out of its packaging. Snack break!
With great trepidation, I removed my jacket, basking in the refreshing breeze like a plump, majestic gazelle. With great ignorance as to how fucking dumb it made me look, I wrapped my jacket around my waist, making sure that I tied the arms up a bit higher than normal so as to cover up my stomach, thereby making it look...smaller, somehow. With great excitement, I hopped on my bike, hurried over to burden my friends with my presence, and set off for home.
Now, to get home, my friends and I had to ride through a rather large cemetery. The road through the cemetery is on an incline that would best be described as "suicidal." Needless to say, my friends and I took great pleasure in barreling down that hill like there was an endless supply of Xbox Live and Doritos at the bottom - without helmets of course, because when you're a dumb middle schooler, you really should go all out. These high velocity rides had the tendency to create a lot of drag. On this particular day, all the air was trapped by my jacket and caused it to go billowing in the wind behind me, which I thought was great fun...
...right up until my rear tire gobbled up my jacket, causing it to come to a dead halt, all while I was doing my best to set a new land speed record. I had just enough time to realize what was happening to my bike, and was about halfway through accepting my imminent death when gravity pulled me by the hair and smashed me into the street.
JESUS, TAKE THE WH - BBJASKFDTBNLKJKLTH *dead*
I collided with the street at the same speed that most asteroids collide with the planet, and I was even less intact by the time I finally came to a stop. After skidding along the road like the world's most unfortunate drift racer, momentum mercifully let go of my body. My arm was reduced to little more than pulpy mulch, and the only thing that kept the back of my skull from being pounded into dust was the massive bulk of my backpack taking the brunt of the impact for me. When I was finished trying to paint the street with my own blood, I was in utter agony, howling into the sky and trying to disentangle my bruised legs from the battered remnants of my bicycle. My friends, being the stalwart companions that they were, quickly stopped and...well, laughed, mostly. The only bright side was that this all occurred in the middle of a cemetery, so if I had died they could have probably gotten away with just rolling me a few feet into the grass and calling it good.
You know what, people can just walk around him. Halo doesn't play itself, you know.
After laying down for a minute to let the pain lessen a bit, I determined that the pain had no intention of lessening, and was in fact gaining strength with every passing second like the Hulk chewing on a rod of plutonium. In an effort to gauge what exactly had happened to my body, I started testing out my extremities to try and assess what was and wasn't broken. The first limb I tried moving was my left arm (the arm I had landed on). This turned out to be the exact wrong limb, as I managed to raise it all of an inch before the thumping pain in my left collar bone blossomed like a rose, albeit a rose made out of debilitating anguish. The pain was such that I immediately went into shock - my hearing dulled to almost nothing as my vision exploded in a brilliant display of neon greens and vibrant purples.
Dazed, half blind, nearly deaf and bleeding all over the sidewalk, I started to panic. As the walls of my mind began to contract, I looked about my surroundings, desperately trying to clear my head and get a sense of what was happening. As my eyesight began to fail me, I saw an ominous black figure standing in the road some distance behind us - Death, it had to be. Death, in all its horrible splendor, burdened with glorious duty, had come to claim me. Overcome with the effort it took to keep myself in a sitting position, I collapsed onto the sidewalk. I tried to speak, to voice some protest against my imminent demise, but found that I could form no words. Fine, I thought. Take me as I am. Ferry me across the River Styx - I wasn't done, but I will go with dignity.
"It's time to go," Death intoned. I closed my eyes, readying myself for the journey with this otherworldly claimant of souls. So be it, said I.
To be continued.
Author's note: The last time I wrote anything on this blog was almost a year ago. I just suck, don't I?
Photo credits, courtesy of Corbis: Elisa Lazo de Valdez, Tetra Images, 2/Ocean, Alejandro Almaraz, 2/Nisian Hughes/Ocean.
