Horses lend us the wings we lack

This is a famous quote by Pam Brown. We’ll find out how it makes any sense here.

This is my first attempt at writing a blog, and I am picking a pretty weird topic to start with. I have a history of some really painful injuries and accidents, and I decided to capture those experiences in words. Some of the details might be a bit gory, but I’ll do my best to keep them PG-13.

Before starting this blog, I made a quick list of my significant injuries over the years. Let’s talk about 1 of those here. This was in my childhood years, when I was around 8 years old.

I don’t remember the year exactly, but I must have been in 3rd or 4th standard in school. It was the time of mid-year exams. I was done with a couple and had few more to go. One of those days, around 5 in the evening, me and my sister(elder to me) planned to go to a nearby store to get some stationery supplies. The store was in someone’s house, about 8-10 mins walk and was facing a huge park. The park had concrete walls and some iron fences in between, making up to a total height of around 4ft.

As we were coming out of the store with new tools to conquer the exams, we saw a few horses in the park. This park had a small temple, bunch of swings, and huge open areas where we used to play cricket. Seeing horses in this park was something completely new and exciting for us. Finding it hard to contain our excitement, we decided to venture more. The incidents that took place from this moment on shaped a large part of my relationship with my sister, developing trust issues that still linger around.

At this moment, my sister suggested that I should go inside the park and chase the horses, while she stayed outside. Like the stupid, obedient and excited brother I was, I took the advice and went in the park through one of the gates. And I couldn’t hold my horses, off I went chasing one of them. Even before I could understand what happened, I got kicked in the face by a horse and fell on the ground. Having watched a few Bollywood movies, I had seen that when someone is down on the ground, horses keep jumping on their chest till that person is not dead. Survival instincts took over, I got up immediately and started running towards the park boundary.

What happened next remained a mystery forever. As I was running for life and was closer to the wall, I put one foot somewhere and jumped over the 4ft high wall. I tried doing that for a few years later but could never do it or understand how I did it that day. But in one way or another, horses lent me the wings I lacked, to make it out of the park.

I came out of the park, my lower lip was split and blood was dripping. We made the hard long walk back home. My mom, kudos to her, didn’t faint looking at me. Took me to hospital right away where they had to put 10+ stitches to sew that up. On the plus side, I didn’t have to take the rest of the exams. A friend in my class was sad for me but happy for herself. We both used to compete for top ranks in our class, and she knew right away there is no competition this year.

Thanks to my sister, I got to tell this story to my 3-year-old niece, minus the part that it was her mom’s idea. All she wanted was to see a picture of the horse that kicked me! Kids are the best.