No one ever fell in love gracefully.

For me, it was that fated Thursday afternoon, we had a lunch break and a double PE class after that. I followed the other guys to the boys' locker room which was kinda fancy looking from all the ones I had seen in movies. I was new but only one of 4 out the 14 in our class and one of my newly made friends showed it to me. He suggested we change during lunch, so we wouldn't be late since the PE was after a Math class after lunch. So we changed early and went to math class and then to the field and found out we were going to be playing football. Let me start by saying this upfront I was fat kid before I went to boarding school and in boarding school I hated the food and was picky eater, so I ate very little food, at the same time we had a hectic schedule, and we had an hour and a half games time in the evening where we played 8 or 7 a side football or if you fancy the term soccer, so after 3 years I was no longer fat, I was very fit but still had the confidence of playing like the fat kid trying to cover as much of the goal possible and rushing the person with the ball, in other words, bad. So I was surprised when I got picked early and got assigned the inner left wing position as a defender, I guess it did help that one of my new friends was one of the team captains, Nepotism for the win.

Have you ever heard of the phrase "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king", that afternoon gave me the realization of its opposite. I had been the featherweight boxer fighting among the heavyweights, It wasn't that I was bad but the rest of the people I played with were just too good. In my boarding school, there were maybe 2 others who played at the same level of skill as me but here I was right smack in the middle of the pack and so for the most part, I was holding my own and having fun. The feeling of actually accomplishing something and not just trying slow down the other team's forwards was great and that's when it happened. It was around the time the bell rang for the end of the first period of PE and the beginning of the second, and we had just restarted the game after a little halftime break. The ball was in the middle of the field the midfielders and forwards of the opponent's team were passing the ball around trying to get through our players, not all of them were great players so there were some missed passes back and forth and the rest of us were just waiting for either side to get a breakthrough when I heard shouts of cheering from my right side on our end of the field. I turned my head and saw her standing there in the girls PE uniform, looking so beautiful like no one I have ever seen, and it happened the "Enemy Action" I was so dreading, the sweating and the nervousness wasn't that big a deal but the muscles twitched once felt like they were locked and I couldn't move, the nerves heated up like lightning flowing through them, painful as I have never felt before, time seemed to slow down to a halt and I heard my name being shouted out loud by a few people and then saw the sudden look of fear on the face of the girls I was facing. Before I could fully turn my head to look at what it was that caused that look of fear and that sudden shout by the guys I felt the ball hit me extremely hard on the left side of my face much harder than I expected a student could, with my stance off balance, the hit lifted me off my feet turning me mid-air I began to fall face first towards the ground in excruciating slow motion. My body was locked and I couldn't move, My nerves burning causing extreme amounts of pain which made the hit on the face not feel as bad and time was ticking by so slowly like it would last an eternity. People say love hurts but I didn't know "falling in love" would hurt so bad and I hadn't even hit the ground yet. I could only hope it would be over soon and then as I was falling my eyes looking back at her that lightning truly struck, and I mean that literally, in the mildly cloudy afternoon there was a sudden lightning strike that defied all sense and as I was told later struck the top left corner of the goal post, deflected straight to me, hitting my body on my heart and flung me back head over heels. I flew from about halfway into our side of the field and landed next to the other team's goalpost. As soon as the lightning had hit me I had lost consciousness and didn't know what was happening in the real world, the last thing I had seen was the fear struck face of the girl that I now knew that I loved and now I was floating in an empty void of space with a weird purple and green haze floating around mixing with each other in the outer edges of my vision, slowly increasing in volume. Floating in this empty void gave me a very liberating feeling of lightness and there was no feeling of pain or any sense of time passing all I could feel was the cool relaxing feeling like floating in the water. I couldn't really move my body still but it no longer felt like it was locked up only that I was relaxed like I had no control over my body, and it was floating in the same spot bobbing up and down like a buoy floating in the waves.