Why I Will NEVER Go Bungee Jumping

Okay, so for today, I’m going to tell you a short story. Yes, I wrote it myself, but I do have to give my sister Julia credit for the crazy – yet amazingly wonderful idea.

So here it goes!!!

It was just a normal, stinky day at prison camp – oops, sorry, I mean Fairfield Junior High. Teachers were grumpy (the majority of them loosing their temper and indignantly chucking pencils at students – YES, this has happened before…), students’ eyes red and swollen from lack of sleep, the cafeteria overflowing with students and permanently stained with cheap ketchup and the stench of rubber hotdogs. Flies buzzed around the heads of the pencil-chucking, frizzy-haired teachers, and students bounced the rubbery hotdogs on the lunchroom tables (I did this today!!! Shhh, don’t tell the lunch lady – the one that always seems to be watching me…). While I was at lunch today, picking hairs out of my practically frozen pizza, a girl with a pointy nose like a witch and earrings the size of a watermelon bumped into me as she strutted past my table.

“WHATTHEHECKISTHATHARDTHINGONYOURBACK!!!!???” She screamed in my face.

“Excuse me?” I asked politely.

“What the heck is that hard thing on your back!?” She repeated, after swallowing a ton of air and catching her breath.

Long story short, I ended up having to lie down on a cot in the nurse’s office (I’d virtually passed out), all at the thought of my dreadful memory.

THE STORY BEGINS HERE:

       Flashback to April 1904. I can remember vividly that gloomy night in Paris, France at about midnight. The sky was dumping its’ rain on the city, and I was in the act of hurling myself off the Eiffel Tower.

STOP! I know what you’re thinking, and no, I was NOT committing suicide! Don’t interrupt me. Now, back to the story.

       Picture a billion, golden, glowing city lights zoooooooooming towards you. That’s what it looked like, the Eiffel Tower growing taller above my head, and the city swelling below me. Without warning, the bungee chord snapped in two. The Eiffel Tower flashed once in my memory, and the ground literally smashed my face - the hardest punch anyone could ever imagine.

And that was the last thing I remembered.

At least, that was the last thing I remembered until September of 1978, when I vaguely recall waking up for a time. Everything was blurry, but I registered that I was positioned on an operating table with something hard and metallic shoved up my spine. And that was the last thing I remembered.

Just kidding, that was only the last thing I remembered until May of 2001, when I was brought back to a new home, safe and sound. Well, sort of safe and sound. It was safe and sound besides the random hard and metallic thing shoved up my spine.

Then came the tricky part of rehabilitation. I couldn’t figure out what had happened! One minute I was in euphoria land, bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower experiencing the ultimate thrill, the night that was supposed to be the greatest night of my life. The next, everyone was saying it was the twenty-first century, and talking about mysterious gadgets called  “computers” and “iphones” and “X-Rays”.

Eventually, I caught on and tried to live my life as if it had been this way forever (to tell you the truth, though, I never quite caught on to the “Don’t worry, darling, you were just paralyzed for a few years,” and “you’re a normal person now,” and “actually, we froze you for a hundred or so years, that’s why we’re in the twenty-first century now….”, therapy and so-called “help” from doctors). I attended middle school like all the other kids, even though I was approximately hundred years older than them. Yeah, I had a hard time explaining to everyone that somehow my age had been frozen for a century….

No one believes me yet.

But maybe they will now, after the incident in the lunchroom that the whole school has definitely heard about by now. Maybe even that bratty girl who just HAD to ask about that hard thing on my back will believe me .

But whatever happens, I know that my life will never again be the same. And I will NEVER repeat my mistake bungee jumping, not even off the Eiffel Tower ……

So, did you like my story?

You don’t need to tell me. I know it’s weird. J