Becoming The Muse

Back in school I wasn’t athletically inclined, neither were the rest of my classmates in the Science class. You were more likely to find us in the library or study centre than at the grounds playing sport. Every term we would have an inter-class friendly march dubbed Bhora ReChingwa i.e. Bread Soccer Tournament because the winning team would walk away with a dozen loaves of bread and cordial juice.

A bit of back story…. This was a mission boarding school which had a strict policy on the food and snacks you could have as well as the amount of pocket money you had. Bread was a valuable commodity, it was the height of luxury to have a whole loaf of bread to yourself. So of course, you would play your hearts out for a chance to win the grand prize.

My classmates and I would usually just cheer from the sidelines refusing to join along the fun and games. In my final junior term, we unanimously thought, hey, why not? we were probably going to lose anyway so lets go out there and say we came, we played and we conquered… To everyone’s surprise our class won the tournament…. That evening we had a bread party in the hostels… fun times.

Hot on the heels of the excitement of the win, I was challenged to a 2000m race, 5 laps around the track… We would each bet a can of baked beans and half-a-loaf of bread and the winner would take it all. I was feeling euphoric from our class winning so I accepted the challenge.

On your marks!
Get set!
Go!
And we were off…..

Did I say I wasn’t athletically inclined? I might have misrepresented the truth a little bit. See, I was in the Quiz Team and I was in the Debate and Public Speaking Teams and the practise times for those coincided with when the others would be out doing sport, so that was my excuse for bailing out on sporting activities. Besides, I was better at those things than in sport and got a chance to represent the school and even appeared on TV for the Lyons National High School Quiz.

During the evenings, I would head out to the tracks and in the cool breeze beneath the stars, I would run a couple of laps before heading to the showers and turning in for the night. I would run at casual pace, slow and steady with my headphones plugged into my Walkman listening to cassettes with my favourite music taped from radio.

When the race started everyone else sprinted ahead while I maintained my familiar pace, slow and steady, lap by lap; one by one, I passed the other racers, until I was in the second position. In the last fifty metres I finally revved up the engines, giving it everything I had… I ran so hard and so fast that the soles of my feet blistered off… Running barefoot was  bad bad idea.

I won.

People were surprised I won, they had never seen me run, figured I would be an easy target simply contributing to the win pot.

Afterwards, I had to go see a doctor…

On the upside I got a Travel Pass that allowed me to go to town to visit the doctor and also go home for a couple of days. My doctor was very worried as to the state of the soles of my feet. He shared concerns with my mum that I might be of a self-harm-risk or had joined a secret cult that liked to burn the soles of their feet as part of the initiation… Doctors think they know everything.

My feet healed just fine, although if you look very carefully, just beneath my toes, there scars that looks like once upon a time I tried to sandpaper the prints off my toes… 😂

There is a moral to this story I forgot what it was but its there somewhere… maybe it’s a story about how scars tell a story.

~B

WinterABC2023