Second grade ruled, in my head. I wasn’t the new kid at school anymore, and I was so committed to doing everything I could with my friends and for my friends. And they were letting me know how they felt about it! One day, they challenged me to cross the big monkey bars on the playground. For a scrawny little nerd like myself, that was a tall order; day after day, I’d calloused my hands on the small set of monkey bars, hauling myself across like bags of feed sailors would throw onto a galleon. It wasn’t graceful, but hey, I got across.
So, when issued this challenge, what was I - Nicholas Provenghi, certifiable geek and menace extraordinaire - going to do? Obviously I was going to take my skinny ass up the tower and cross those monkey bars like my life depended on it. As soon as I gripped the first bar and swung myself out, my brain fired into overdrive. Suddenly, I was out over a lava flow, and I was rushing to my friend’s aid on the other side. Other kids’ yells slowly faded out, and just like any good disaster movie protagonist, I steadied my nerves and pushed on. Now, this wasn’t a huge chasm by any measure, but by this point, I might as well have been crossing the Grand Canyon, so I felt the pressure on me to get across.
About halfway through, after having swung like a ritalin-crazed monkey through the first half of the course and having navigated the first of the bends in the S-bend that the bars snaked through the low playground sky, I hit a wall. As funny as it would be to have been literal, it was just the physical, and I hung there for a few seconds, catching my breath. Looking out towards the goal, the other tower, I resolved to finish my journey. A few deep breaths later, I swung outward, once more. As soon as my left hand flew forward, I knew I was in trouble.
From a young age, my sense of coordination has been… lackluster, to be kind to myself. I’d bump into doors, counters, frames, walls, anything that was never meant to be an obstacle would be deified as such when I walked into it. The inverse is also true; the more I’m targeting something, the more likely I am to miss it completely. It’s like an imperceptible and undetectable wind just blows me off center whenever I do something requiring dexterity. Well, that day on the playground, that wind kicked up, and my little left hand grasped at air where a metal bar was not.
The sequence of events was pretty magical after that; all my momentum from the whiffed grab pulled my little body forward, and my sweaty right hand lost its hold on the bar I was holding. Now in freefall, I stretched out, not unlike a really big, really stupid cat, and assumed an almost reclined position. If a fainting couch had been under me, I could’ve been a Baroque masterpiece, but alas, that wasn’t meant to be. What was meant to be was for my body to slam into the ground below, which just so happened to be covered in smooth little stones, instead of sand or mulch.
Having just fallen about seven feet in the middle of a screaming playground, you would think that I had people rushing to my aid, right? Or at least a chaperone would’ve come to check on me? Well, you’d be wrong! I might as well have fallen through the rocks into the Earth, because life continued on without me. The kids who issued the challenge initially? Nowhere to be seen, after chuckling and then running down from the tower to who knows where. In my breathless shock, I couldn’t get up, and so I dragged myself through the gravel, to a big plastic slide, and managed to hide there and sob silently.
Sure, I’d tried and failed to do the monkey bars, but this was a big deal to that little kid. Like I said, I wanted to be friends with all of my classmates, and I wanted to help them out and prove to them that I really liked them. And that didn’t go over well, to the point where most of them just placated me with the most basic answers to questions and interactions. This was the very first time that they had asked me to do something! It felt like I finally had broken through, and I was finally going to be able to prove myself!
This chance I had to transcend the second grader social ladder was once in a lifetime, and I had just blown it. Not only had I blown it, my failure wasn’t even deserving of scorn. There wasn’t some nightmarish assembly of kids hovering over my limp and injured body, making fun of me to my face, kicking me, or just being little seven year old sociopaths, there was just absence. They only saw me as someone to observe, someone eager to please them, and someone who deserved the least amount of time they would spare me. I fell, they laughed, and that was it. Not even in failure could I capture their care or attention, not even a fraction of that which I had for them. And so I cried, not knowing why.
I cried for the rest of recess, and then through class. It was only after the teachers had blown the whistles and brought everyone back in for class that anyone noticed I was gone. They found me, still crying, under the slide about 20 minutes after recess ended, and when I emerged from my hot plastic sarcophagus, two younger kids helped me stand up and took me back to the chaperone. She sent me to the nurse after I explained what happened. Everyone asked me why I hid under the slide, and I couldn’t answer them. Not the nurse, the chaperone, my teacher, my mother, or myself, even. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have an answer. For the first time, my voice had been taken away.
There was a crack, emanating across my face, and it felt like I was the only one who saw it.