Concrete (word ask meme narf)
Let’s go back to when I was about 11 years old.
SometimesI used to go and ride my bike with a friend of mine from school named Ryan. He was like me: kinda dopey, kinda foolish, dumpy and blonde-haired and a little on the short side but sprouting up quick. Bright, but not brilliant. Kind, and warm, with a little tiny curve of a smile.
We were mistaken for siblings constantly…whenever we weren’t mistaken for a couple.
He gave me little bits of jewelry now and then and my mother told me he had a crush on me.
But when I was 11 we used to go and ride our bikes on the weekend sometimes, especially down Manila Ave across the street from where I lived, which had the longest, sharpest hill anywhere in our area and going down without sunglasses, even if you didn’t pedal much, tore tears from your eyes that’s how fast you’d go.
But we’d bike and bike and we’d go down past the middle school all the way to 2nd Ave and because I knew the roads, I’d lead us down toward where the two nice women from temple lived, whose house I’d go to after school before Mom could come get me, where I’d practice clarinet squeakily in the back of a room that had so much stuff in it that whenever I read about the hidden Hogwarts vault contained in the Room of Requirement I imagined that room instead.
(It was only later that I came to understand that they were a very nice lesbian couple. At 11 I definitely didn’t notice, though I thought it was awful cute that they lived together and that the one of them had just had a cute little baby boy.)
But one day on a sunny afternoon we were biking along the sidewalk toward the nice couple’s house. I was riding ahead of him, and didn’t notice the giant crack in the pavement until it was far too late.
I pitched forward, spinning all the way over the handlebars to smash my face and my knees into the cement. Even though at the time I had a comically low tolerance for pain, I remember that I didn’t cry, I didn’t scream. Ryan helped me up and I must’ve been bleeding some, but I just sort of blinked around, bewildered that I was no longer sitting astride my bike, but was instead on the ground, knees aching and my face speckled from gravel and dirt pressing into my skin.
