The Window Game

In middle school, me and my friend Hanne, used to stand next to this huge window in the third floor of our school.
We always arrived quite early, and loved to do this "game" of ours, where we would scout for people passing by on the icy road under us.
When someone would walk pass there, we would knock hard on the window, and then hide.



The whole point was to make people fall on the ice. To make the passersby, turn their heads up, thinking someone was waving at them, and then fall as they forgot the importance of keeping their feet from sliding all over.



We weren't mean. Just a bit mad, I guess.

One day, we were standing in a different corridor, and the whole class was waiting there for our teacher to show up.
Me and Hanne were standing next to a window.
Hanne saw someone pass us by outside, so she knocked hard on the window, and we both jumped down to hide.

Our classmates saw this.
And unfortunately, a few of them had been the victim of our little game.
so it didn't take long before they started pointing at us and yelling "IT'S YOU GUYS! IT WAS YOU ALL ALONG!"



vops.

I don't remember exactly what happened next.
I know that Hanne stood up for the both of us and said something about us being allowed to have a little bit of fun in a boring school like this.
And I think I was laughing. Hard. I somehow found the whole thing hysterical.



The mystique was now gone.
The game was never the same again.

Breathing through a straw

When I was 11, I lost the ability to constantly breathe normally.



Sometimes, it was so hard to breathe, that it felt like I was breathing through a straw, and that my lungs simply didn't exist anymore - it was just a black hole there instead, absorbing my faint tries to get oxygen into my body, making me look funny for even trying.



No one knew why this happened to me.
Some of my friends simply laughed at me for breathing so hard after climbing up a hill "Man, you're out of shape!" they would say.



My cat could see that something was wrong when I tried to breathe normally, so she would accompany me by lying in a ball on my bed, purring loudly, as to say "It's all gonna be okey"



After I got into such a state of hysterical breathing, that I smiled like an idiot to my family, because my brain simply didn't have enough oxygen to work normally, my parents took me to the doctor.



It turned out, I had allergies.
Allergies for fur, and for grass.
And I got a bad asthma as a reaction.

No!
My cat!
She had so kindly been purring "It will all be okay" to me the other day,
but what would happend to her now?

I wasn't happy about it, but I understood the importance of getting a fur-free home.
We were lucky though, we found a new home for our cat.

I hated myself for being the reason we had to give our cat away.
It was my fault, and I felt sorry for my cat, and I felt sorry for myself.

I got some asthma and allergy medicines, which I had to use often in the start.
I even had to bring the medicine to school.

When the other kids learned why I had been breathing so weirdly, and when they saw my fancy spray-in-mouth medicine, they got this weird look of awe in their faces. (which, is pretty weird, now that I think back about it).



"HAH!" I was thinking.
I wasn't out of shape after all. I just couldn't breathe normally while climbing that hill because off all the grass and the threes there!
My friends was now suffering the consequences of being WRONG.
And just like that, I felt better again.