For my eighth Christmas, I was given a ten-speed "big girl" bike. My best friend and I decided that our bikes were invincible, and the next day we were riding through neighbors' back yards and eventually found ourselves in my backyard, with the bright idea to ride along the very edge of my swimming pool. She was behind me but her front tire was right alongside my back tire. She wobbled, which knocked my bike and me into the pool. I remember opening my eyes under water and looking up seeing my bike right above me, and I frantically kicked off the floor of the pool to get to the surface. During my rapid ascension, the kickstand of my bike sliced my upper thigh. I went to the hospital but refused stitches, instead getting the most expensive band-aid application of my life. At the time, and at my small size, the scar seemed to take up so much of the length of my thigh. My brothers called it "the worm" and it took me a long time to wear a bathing suit without longer shorts over it to hide the scar. My parents promised that when I turned sixteen, they’d pay for plastic surgery to buff it down or somehow make it smaller. That idea never really appealed to me, and by my sixteenth birthday I hadn’t even remembered that promise anyhow. Now I’m twenty-five and the scar is about 3 or 4 inches long on my much longer adult leg, and I hardly take it into consideration.
No comments:
Post a Comment