I’ve been sick this past week and I’m feeling thoroughly uncreative right now, but I feel like I should write something just to make up for my laziness. Not 100 words, but I hope you don’t mind.
I’ve been reminiscing a lot lately, more than usual I suppose. I have a thing for trying to remember events from my past, just to relive some of my carefree childhood. I find it so fascinating how memories just disappear after a few years. Everything in life is so routine that it just gets lost in the subconscious. Despite this, if you try hard enough (or long enough, in my case) you can trigger certain times of significance. Birthdays are easy enough. One of my most memorable birthdays occurred in Tennessee, the beginning of spring, just your average house party set up in the garage. We had just finished watching a movie, and everyone was itching (after all, it was spring) to go outside. But lo and behold, it was snowing! Not a single flake all winter, and on my birthday no less. Very memorable.
But! That’s not what I came here to talk about. Yes, that moment will stick with me a long time, but it’s the small details that make the memory all the more interesting. For example, the movie we watched that day was Toy Story, I failed miserably at Spin the Tail on the Donkey (yes, people actually played that game at birthdays), we ate ice cream in cups that you had to open before eating which were a novelty to me at the time, and my mother scolded me for running outside without putting sweats on for the snow. Also, a few years later, I would somehow refer to that birthday in my essay regarding Abraham Lincoln. Don’t ask me how, I was weird back then.
Anywho, from that one memorable moment, I was able to go much further, recalling details that would have been lost on a normal day. This is why I love to reminisce. To find those moments that you had once forgotten, deemed pointless but suddenly a new thought or realization brings them back to light. Which brings me to that very scene, the one I meant to write about before I started rambling.
It was third grade...maybe. My age is not important. All I remember is that I was riding the bus to or from school, neither is particularly enlightening. Was I in Tennessee, or Alaska? I forget. The only thing that matters is that these two older kids turn around and face myself and a friend, smiles on their faces no doubt. They tell us that they had found a cool way to kill yourself. All you had to do was press on the side of your head, just above the ears, as hard as you can. If you did it right, your head would pop off, to wild applause. (They didn’t say that last part.) I was horrified, of course. Death was just some phantom to me, something to be avoided nevertheless. My friend, however, thought that this idea appealed to his love of the grotesque. And so he put his fingers to his head.
Now, at this point I must say that he was only joking around, as were the two older kids. Haha, but you didn’t need me to tell you that, yes? Well, apparently, I did. At that moment, I screamed at a fairly loud volume, “Don’t do it! I don’t want you to die!”
...
And that’s all I can remember. Just the feeling of horror at seeing him almost explode, it was too much for me. Now, whether this really happened or not, or if I’m forgetting certain details, I have no idea. But amidst the stress of midterms and whatnot, a bit of comic relief at the expense of my younger self isn’t so bad. Gosh, how stupid was I? Oh well, it’s just a memory.
And now, back to my routine of 100 words. I’ll try not to disappoint.
