I should start finding alternatives to how I begin these posts, because very frequently do I start them off with some iteration like, "It's been quite some time" or " too much time has past'' etc.
It has been been 84 years since I wrote my last post. I can't be bothered to remind myself what I had written about. Best case scenario, it makes me nostalgic. Worst case, I die from embarrassment. I have been meaning to write something for a while, don't get me wrong. I just haven't found anything to write about. Granted, at first I thought it was because my life had been pretty uneventful these past few months, but that's not the case. It's been pretty spectacular lately. Maybe there was a different reason. Perhaps I strayed from the original intent that I had for this blog. So, here I am, once again, willing to breath in renewed life into this creation.
Today's story is about how I burned my back. Picture me, a mere child at 12 years old, about to reach that golden era of adolescence. It was a regular evening, my friends and I were playing by the community swimming pool. My apartment complex had a pool and an adjoining play area. Being boys, we were fooling around. We had started to throw water on a couple of a girls that were swimming. We were all each others' friends so it was all fun and games, apart from one girl who was just visiting. We were teasing them by scooping up water in cups and throwing it back at them in the pool. (yes, we weren't the smartest lot). The girl in question, decidedly, gets out and exits the pool area. We see that as an absolute win.
About five minutes of throwing and splashing later, I feel a chill down my spine. The kind where you forget to turn the heater on and step into the shower only to be welcomed by the consequence of your carelessness. The chill last exactly five seconds before it's replaced by an immense pain. In her desire for vengeance, the idiot went to the drinking water dispenser and got some boiling hot water in a cup. And here I used to think revenge was a dish best served cold. It took me a minute to register what she'd done. I had never felt pain like that before. Somehow, I had enough acuity to collect my thoughts and respond. I would not cry, or show pain, not in front of these girls (pre-pubescence is a bitch). I walked away, while she stood there laughing. To her defense, she probably didn't think it through, not considering the gravity of what she'd done. She was just playing the game, although with much higher stakes.
I walked and walked. For some reason, and this is something I cannot for the life of me, understand, is what I did next. Now usually, any rational individual would run like the wind. Go back to safely in the fastest time possible. I decided to take the stairs instead of the elevator. I chose to walk up three flights of stairs. Then I walked down the corridor to my house, as if returning from a busy day of playing. It was only after I closed the door behind me that the tears started flowing.
Both my mother and sister looked on in horror as I tried to describe what had just happened. They had to cut the shirt and peel it off my back. I sat under the cold shower for 15 minutes until I was in any condition to move. I liked that shirt.
Later, my sister gave me a tub of ice-cream and put on my favorite Harry Potter DVDs to cheer me up. While this was going on, in parallel there was another story unfolding as well. Once I had left, my friends realized what went wrong. They went to complain to the family the girl was staying with. Then they ran up to my house to check on me. I didn't want to see them, so they started to tell me the story through closed doors. Apparently, once the girls got back from their swim, the father of the other girl dished out a beating. This man had a reputation for being the cool dad, because he worked at Sega, and brought over a lot of games for us to try. No one had ever seen him so furious. Solar eclipses occur more frequently. He slapped her and called her parents to take her away. In his defense, she was pretty narcissistic to begin with. It felt like justice had been served.
It took a month to heal, and the entire month I spent taking my shirt off to show the building moms what happened to my back.
I don't think there's a lesson to be learnt from this ordeal. It was an event that took place. It shouldn't have, but it did. I only ever saw her once after, two years later. As fate would have it, this time I was in the pool, and she was standing on the ground.
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