To Jump or Not to Jump

The only adult in the house with three bedrooms, a family room, a living room, and a dining room, was a young housemaid. It was a she. Her job was to make sure that the children occupying the spacious house ate their lunch and took their day nap before the afternoon. Except that a parent-free house and a lazy afternoon gave the best setting for children’s mischiefs.

As far as I remember, that year I hated a classmate whose body odor reminded me of salted eggs. Boiled ones. I must have been in fourth grade, living the tenth year of my life. My brother was younger by two years. The age of following and mirroring his sibling. That would be me. We were the only little humans in the family photograph hanging on the wall of the living room.

We had our lunch. We went to a no-brand, no-rank private elementary school half an hour drive from home. From where I came from, this type of school was equal to almost nonexistent homework. When our parents, especially Mother, were out there somewhere, we had the house to ourselves. Since the notion of a party was not part of our vocabulary, we were content with exploring things that our Mother specifically told us not to.

Exhibit A: The old wardrobe sitting in my parents’ room. It was an unassuming black wooden wardrobe with double doors and a single door full of drawers. The piece of furniture stored my parents’ clothes and trinkets. The aroma of vetiver and camphor filled the inside. The last time I was standing next to my Mother, who was looking for something in the wardrobe, I crawled under the hanging gowns and suits, on top of folded clothes. It was the perfect soundproofed hiding spot! Of course, she pulled my feet and gave me a stern look of “never-again” warning.

Exhibit B: The bare ladder leaning precariously against the wall of the family room waved an open invitation to an exciting world of a half-finished attic mezzanine turned into a storage room. The only way to access the attic mezzanine was by climbing the bare ladder with some nails sticking out.

I had been eyeing that ladder since my Father moved some boxes up several months ago. He always took the ladder away and kept it outside.

That one fine afternoon, it was there.

“What do you think?” I looked at my brother.

“Huh?” Of course. He was eight. What do you expect?

“I want to see what’s up there.”

“How?

I pointed at the ladder and walked towards it. I held the ladder with my two hands, trying to feel its strength.

“Dare to climb it to go up?” Asked my brother.

“Sure!” That was me, with the confidence of a drill sergeant. “Hold the ladder for me!” My brother obediently did so.

My bare feet stomped on the floor of the storage room. The plywood base was covered with a thick layer of dust. It felt slippery on my dry soles. I swept through the room. Boxes everywhere. A wall shelf full of thick, old books with endless stacks of paper crowding the shelves.

My brother called my name. I held the ladder from the top. He was much lighter than I was, thus he climbed faster and easier.

“What are we gonna do here?”

I did not answer his question and walked towards one of the boxes. I opened one. Magazines. Past editions of a magazine that my parents were still subscribing at that time. In my adulthood, the government would shut down that magazine for some administrative reason. The kid version of myself had fun taking the magazines out from the boxes just to check out the covers. One box was done. More to go! My brother went on to check out the other side of the wall. He found some old toys. It did not take long for us to get bored from our little exploration. We, more like I, looked at the mess we made.

“What time is it?” I wondered. My brother shrugged. “Do you think Mother would be angry if she finds us up here?” The response was another shrug.

The only logical way to go down would be the ladder. Except that my brother had no idea how to hold the ladder for me. He did not dare to go first.

I looked down from the mezzanine’s half wall. The family room looked like a vast space into which I could actually dive into. I remembered a superhero movie that our Father took us to watch. The hero was a guy with a red cape. He looked graceful and cool whenever he made the jump or leap into the air. I was seriously considering trying the same technique. Jumping could not have been that difficult. I was also wondering whether I would float like he did in the movie. The height stopped me. My brother suggested that we wait for help. We called out the housemaid’s name. No answer. We shouted to the top of our lungs. We waited for a bit longer. The clock was ticking. I had a very good feeling that Mother was just around the corner. She could have been at the front gate as we were waiting like two clueless monkeys in the forbidden storage. She would go bazooka if she had found us up here. Most probably she would not feed for God knows how long.

I made the jump. Bam!

I did not float. I passed out.

When I finally regained consciousness, it was already the following day. Around the same time as I made the fateful low-altitude-no-opening jump. My body felt stiff. One of my feet felt heavy. Some sort of casing was cast around it. I managed to move my body and used my hands to lower my feet-in-cast to the floor. I tried to stand up and failed. I sat down on the floor and dragged myself to see whether the world was still around. I could hear the voice of my Mother. I took the risk. She caught the sight of me peeking from the door to the family room. She did not look happy.

For one good week, I was pretty much confined to the walls of my home. My mother took me to see a doctor for a second visit after the cast was placed. The doctor said that my leg seemed to be fine and the cast could be broken. I was free!

Many moons later in my adult life, reflecting on the incident of my jumping off the attic on a whim despite a quick calculation that it would not have cost my life, it was not hard to say that my life has been about unplanned jumping from one excitement to another with calculated risks. I rarely recounted this incident to people. The last time I did it, they thought I was an alien sent on a mission to colonize the earth.

Note:

This was written as part of a series of assignments in Narrative Essay Workshop, 2018.