What’s your earliest memory involving another person? Recreate the scene — from the other person’s perspective.
One of my earliest memories was perhaps when I was about 2 or 3 years old. I must have only just recently learnt how to walk, and at the time we lived in a small block of flats on the ground floor.
I don’t necessarily remember anybody specific, or any of the kids there, but I know there were a couple of young kids there that I used to play with.
I remember one day the kids and I were playing outside one of our places, and one of the older kids rounded us up (I think there was about four of us), and decided to take us ‘exploring’.
Let’s call her Kelly.
Kelly picked up her younger sibling, and looked at the other 3 toddlers sitting on the concrete with their toys.
Completely disregarding their ages, and the fact that they could only just walk, Kelly decided to do something with the kids. ‘Who wants to go on an adventure?’, she said in her cheesy, overly-excited voice. The kids looked at Kelly, ‘I DO! I DO!’ they sang out. ‘Okay, well follow me!’, and she led the kids down towards the end of the carp park and towards the overgrown foliage at the end. Kelly disappeared into the overhanging tree branches, disappearing behind the leaves. One of the toddlers following her blindly, whilst the other two stopped.
They had been told over and over to NEVER go off the concrete and to NEVER go past the trees or they’d either get a smack, or they’d get eaten by a monster and never come home again. The toddlers, a boy and a girl, looked at each other, and dared not go past the bushes. Kelly popped her head out, ‘Come on kiddies, hurry up. Don’t want to lose you, or you might get eaten by a monster!’. Hearing another grown up mention a monster meant it must be true, and the young girl began crying and crying for her mummy. Kelly emerged, still holding her younger sibling, and sat down next to the crying girl, trying to get her to quieten down. She explained that there was no monster and she just had to be really brave and hold Kelly’s hand the whole time. The young boy, however, wasn’t so easily forgiving. He didn’t want to get eaten by a monster, and decided to stay put and just play with his toy truck instead. Before he knew it, he was off the ground in Kelly’s arm and disappearing behind the foliage. He started wriggling and screaming and trying to get free, ‘No, I can’t let you go, if I left you there by yourself you’d get eaten by the monster, if you stay with me, you’ll be okay and there will be no monsters at all!, Kelly said, in a desperate attempt to calm the boy down.
As they continued to walk along the damp, moist dirt path, they noticed so many things; the smell of the earth; the freshness of all the greenery around them; the bright sunshine streaming through the gaps in the canopy of the trees, until Kelly stopped. ‘Guess what, everybody?! We’re here!’ She put the boy down next to the young girl, and placed the sibling on the ground as well. Before them was a small moss-covered hollow log wedged between two small banks of a tiny ‘creek’.
The toddlers all slowly approached the edge, and Kelly scared the young girl by pretending to push her in, but grabbing hold of her to make sure she didn’t. The girl got such a fright she began crying and crying because Kelly was being mean to her. She wanted to go home. She wasn’t having fun any more. Kelly apologised and tried to calm the girl down. Meanwhile, whilst she was distracted, the young boy had managed to cross the moss-covered log to the other side.
Not having any concept of just how far the drop down was, he sat on the edge one other side of the creek and began playing with his truck in the damp soil. As he began to make all different kinds of truck noises, Kelly realised that this sound wasn’t coming from her immediate vicinity and looked around frantically before realising where the young boy had ventured to. Kelly began to panic. She knew that the log certainly wouldn’t carry her weight and was amazed that it didn’t collapse under the weight of the boy.
Terror began to set in and her brain began spinning at a million miles an hour trying to work out all the different outcomes of this situation – none of them ended well for her. She tried to coax the young boy back across the wooden log, but to no avail; he was far too happy playing in in the dirt with his truck. Kelly didn’t want to tell her parents because she knew they would be so furious, and she didn’t want to get into trouble. As the minutes passed she finally came up with a solution – a ladder! If she could get a ladder, then she could lay it across from one side of the bank to the other, and then crawl across, grab the boy and crawl back, return the ladder and the kids and everybody is home safe and nobody needs to know what happened…
…right?
?
Without thinking she told the other two to stay put and she ran off. As soon as she disappeared, her younger sibling began crying because she was out of sight, and Kelly heard the cries in the distance behind her. She rummaged around down the side of the house to try as quietly as possible to get the ladder out without being noticed. She pulled the ladder and it crashed on the fence. She quickly ducked behind the bin waiting for her father to come and see what the noise was, but he didn’t appear. Kelly grabbed the ladder and disappeared into the bushes once again and returned to the log only to find that not only had her sibling disappeared, but so had the boy on the other side of the creek.
Fearing the worst, Kelly began to yell and yell and yell. She peered over the edge of the river bank, but saw nothing. She noticed the truck was still in the dirt where the boy was playing and knew she hadn’t been gone long, so he couldn’t have wandered too far. As she began calling out his name, she heard a rustle behind a tree, and as she investigated, the sibling jumped out from behind a pile of leaves, scaring Kelly half to death. Kelly squealed and the young girl scared her again, making her squeal even louder a second time, and then both the toddlers began laughing hysterically at how funny it was to scare Kelly.
Kelly began to yell at them both and the sibling began crying again, causing Kelly to quickly change her tone and explain why she was so scared, thinking that she had lost them. But she was more concerned s out where the boy was. The three of them began to call out his name. Kelly picked up the ladder and started walking along the river bank thinking that he might be a bit further downstream.
After several minutes of not getting a response, Kelly knew she was going to be in trouble. She knew her parents were going to be mad, and the police would lock her away because she lost a toddler. Trying not to cry, she kept calling and calling until she heard a response. She ran further along the creek bank towards the voice, and there she saw him, covered in mud, grinning from ear to ear. He was fine.
Kelly slammed the ladder on the ground and then crawled across to check that he was okay, then staying on all fours, she got him to climb up on her back, and she crawled back across the ladder. They got to the other side and he slid off her back and Kelly lay on the ground with a giant sigh of relief. The young girl and the sibling the. Stood over her dropping handfuls of leaves on her and giggling away.
Kelly eventually sat up and bundled up the kids and the ladder and noticed the sun had gone. She knew she was in trouble now as her parents had always told her she had to be home before it was dark or she would be in trouble. She was scared. Her and the kids walked back along the dirt track, through the foliage and back into the carpark – where her parents were waiting. As were the parents of the other kids. Kelly’s father came over and snatched the ladder out of her hands whilst her mother stormed over and snatched the sibling. Kelly gulped and feared for the worst. Al three sets of parents began yelling simultaneously at her and the toddlers got upset for all the yelling. The young girl broke free from her mothers grip, running over to Kelly and hugging her leg. Kelly’s farther, however, grabbed Kelly by the ear, marching her inside the flat and slamming the door behind him. Just as Kelly’s mother began apologising profusely to the other mothers, she was stopped mid-sentence by the screaming of Her husband, at Kelly, grounding her for a month with no cartoons. The mothers all looked at each other and said goodnight and returned to their own apartments.
adorablyobnoxious 