Dangerous Game, Essay Example

It is a cliché, but it is still very true: when you are a child, one single moment can open up new worlds of experience, and that moment changes you forever. Until then, life is only the small routine you have come to know, with your universe composed of home, family, and friends, and all existing in the neat arena bordered by your street. Then there is an accident, and you are thrown into dimensions of awareness for which no child can ever be truly ready. These are the moments, happening in flashes of seconds, when childhood is stripped away and the painful, complicated realities of what life can be explode all around you.

My “explosion” happened when I was nine and, like so many other such turning-points, when there was no reason whatsoever to believe that anything out of the ordinary would occur. After all, I was only doing what I so often did; playing with my sisters, and enjoying that unique feeling of mindless, antic fun only children can know. We were playing a sort of tag, scurrying around, under, and over the the bunk bed set in the bedroom. For a child, bunk beds can be exciting equipment. There are openings and levels, and endless opportunities for some creative, if amateur, gymnastics. No one was winning, but that hardly mattered. It was all about evasion, giggling, and innocent victories traded back and forth in seconds. In the heat of play, I was struck by an inspiration. I would use a different strategy and confuse my sisters. To that end, I climbed up the ladder on my knees, my plan being that, once on top, I would deftly continue my knee-crawl to the other side, and slip down as gracefully as a cat. I can feel the small, metal rungs on my knees today, and hear my sisters shriek with laughter. In a few moments, breathless from the effort and the fun, I reached the top mattress.

When you are nine, minor heights are dizzying triumphs. That is how I felt, slipping over the top bunk. I could do anything, so high was I, and I almost pitied how earthbound my sisters were. Then, time slowed. There were giggles below me, and then a high-pitched shriek. I was not on my knees as planned, yet I was already at the bunk’s edge. In a flash, I was betrayed by my own triumph. I felt and saw my left arm reach out to grab hold of something to steady me, and then it was too late. My balance was gone and I fell over the side, hitting the hard, wooden floor with my face and my chest.

Time, I believe, is an idea and not an actual thing. More exactly, it follows no laws and can defy its usual pace in a heartbeat. How long, really, could I have fallen? A second, or a fraction of a second? Yet there were hours in that moment. Somehow, there was plenty of time for terror to grip me, and to actually see the floor come closer and closer. Even so, everything was also frozen; I believe, in fact, that I could hear my sisters stop breathing in the instant of horrible suspense. Then I crashed down, and shattered my face and my universe. A hundred sensations flooded my small being, and virtually all of them were a kind of pain. There was a new and excruciating agony in my chest, and the novelty of the feeling was just as bad as the actual pain. I felt as though my face had been severely beaten up, never having known what such a thing could feel like. Then, under the physical trauma, a more urgent awareness pressed down on me as I lay there. I suddenly knew that I could break, and completely. The sense of invincibility that is a part of childhood was gone forever.

Then, and very quickly, came that odd sense of distance which follows these accidents. My heart went out to my sisters, screaming over me, but I was unable to reassure them that I was all right. Looking back, I see that one of the many changes occurring was that I saw their faces as I never had before. They were as familiar to me as myself, yet I had never seen them with masks of anguish and desperate fear on their faces. I was also alien to them, in that they wanted to touch me, but were too frightened of doing further harm. Dazed and hurting badly, I heard their crying and shouts as though from miles away. It was strange but, somewhere in my pain, I recall thinking that I was glad neither of them had fallen as I had.

What followed was a family crisis, and I was aware of my mother and father over me, both trying to see how I was and calm my sisters, who were still hysterical. I remember that, as badly as I was hurting, I felt “at home” on the floor, almost as though they were hovering over me in a comfortable bed. I wanted to tell my parents not to blame my sisters. There was guilt in their wet eyes and this was a pain I felt I could dispel, but forming the words was impossible. Then the word, “hospital” was in the air. My father had gently run his hands over me and it seemed that, miraculously, I had broken no bones. Still, my parents seemed determined to get me to an emergency room. I shook my head as best as I could, feeling that I could not bear such a thing. On one level, I think I knew that I would be all right without a doctor. On another, I know I felt that their taking me to the hospital would horribly expand the episode. In pain and still dazed, I wanted only to be left at home, and to already begin moving away from my stupid, awful accident. There were whispers and worries, but I was allowed to stay where I was. That is, with excessive care and the use of many sets of hands, I was taken to bed.

There may be some reason for that sense of invincibility children have, for I soon recovered. Within a few days, in fact, life became its usual, routine affair. Bruises healed, aches faded, and I was once again in the stream of family life, and not an invalid off to the side. I never even developed a fear of bunk beds. Nonetheless, I was changed. There was the new awareness that we are all far more fragile than we may believe, but far more important was the knowledge that remains with me today: when we fall, we do not go down alone. When we suffer pain, we create pain for those near to us. At the age of nine, I was exposed to a reality of life that is both comforting and intimidating, in that we carry with us always a responsibility of many. Bodies heal, but pictures stay in the mind, and the faces of my sisters, streaked with tears, and the faces of my mother and father, looking as though they were confronting the end of the world, will be with me always.