I remember the time I broke all my limbs… well, at least 75% of them. It was a bright and sunny day, which was uncharacteristic of the area. Trees as lieutenants in height only to the mountain on which they sit, meadows miles in length, pockets of lusciously growing grass long familiar to the presence of flowers, and there was me amongst it all. It was tranquil.

While next to all that a highway flowed from one end of the coast side city to the other, and from this flow of traffic departed many tributaries both connecting with one another and splitting off. From one such way I had arrived at a small home, and within that same house was… My sister. You see, we both took part in a sort of timeshare program with our piano learning classes. So during her part I would spend my extra time outside with our teacher’s two sons, swinging like swingers on the two story tall rope-swing…

I may need to describe some geography for this next part. You see, beside my teacher’s house was a rode, going on to one or two neighbouring houses, dug out of a small hill side with a gravel path running along it. And on the subsequently steep slope left from their efforts sat two or more trees. One of these two trees in particular hung outward over the edge of this slope, and hanging tied to that was (and assumably is) a rope-swing…

Now, one could not simply jump on and enjoy the ride, you would have to climb partially up the hill face, with the rope swing in hand, and jump onto the swing’s seat from there. Therefore the higher you jumped from onto the swing the higher the momentum you would achieve: My first and only mistake in this instance. I would like to say that the accompanying child jetted me on leading to my accident, but truthfully I simply loved the rush that came with rocketing downwards in a reverse arch at twenty-plus miles an hour. Then came the my mistake… I grabbed on, I jumped forwards, and my ass missed the seat…

    The hardest part of things like this, where you are the stunt double getting the wind knocked out of him/her, is telling exactly how much air you got. No matter how many times I revisit my short ariel career, I can never seem to tell how high, and how far, I went. The only thing I know for sure is how I flew. Instead of simply falling like five feet down the hill, I had the audacity to hold on to the swing. My mind stopped, my body froze, I felt nothing inside or out. The swing had thrown me from the top to the bottom of the hill, I had even done one or two front-flips mid-air, and I landed with a loudish thud. I screamed.

I had landed on my left arm, and the other landed beside me to similar effect, breaking and disarticulating my wrists. I turned my head to the only witness to the spectacle, and yelled with a coarse voice without feeling or self regard “Get help!”. I felt nothing inside or out, no pain, no malcontent. Perhaps I was ready to die, perhaps I wasn’t. Either way, I wanted a say in the matter.

My piano teacher ran down the hill onto the gravel path, where I lay unmoving. She asked frantically weather I was good to walk, I said yes and with her and her son’s support I began to hobble up the hill. A man drove by in a dark blue truck, undoubtedly to one of the two houses where that path lead. our eyes met. They laid me down flat on their living room floor just in the door, my sister was there having been both practicing her mad piano skillz and ignorant of my current situation. My teacher called 911, and my sister sat in the corner:

I remember little more of what she contributed to this particular chronicle, other that the fact that I screamed at her over and over not to go on the rope swing after me.

Eventually an ambulance arrived, as well as my father who assumed a similar standing-by position as my sister. The nurses pulled out a gurney and heaved me aboard. There was an ambulance, there was a surgery or two, and there was the worst Sprite I had ever drunk. The doctors were actually amazed that I hadn’t suffered any internal bleeding, or a broken neck for that matter.