Brain Tattoo
The sound of what should have been the ambulance was the sound of people crying. The ambulance never showed up. No one knew where the ambulance was but all we knew was that there was a man and he needed help. I have had many other memories of people dieing, mostly family members though. One memory that I have is when my cousin Adam was killed. One day my family and I got a phone call that said that he had committed suicide on the top of his apartment building by hanging himself. Later that year my family and I got another phone call from my grandma saying that Adams sister Niva was found dead in her apartment building, they think that she OD on some pills. Now Adam and Nivas mom is very depressed and I don’t get to see her that much because she’s so sad. Both of those incidents were amazingly scaring for me they are like tattoos in my brain but here is one that I thought was really scary that happened when I was around six years old and my sister was around eight or nine years old.
It all started on a nice sunny day. It looked like that one episode of Spongebob Squarepants where Spongebob, Patrick, and Squidward all make their way up on to land. That episode looked like this day in a sense that it was so sunny, with clear blue skies and crystal clear water. Anyways my family and I were walking along the beach and were watching the Jet skiers go by. This one dude on a jet ski was going crazy. All of a sudden he and his jet ski went flying about fifteen feet in the air. The man went soaring into the air and then quickly under water. After five minutes of him being under water and not coming back up the lifeguards sent out to rescue him in their motor boat. The motor boat came in quickly onto the shore. The jet skier was quickly surrounded by paramedics. While all of this was going down my whole family and I were about twenty feet away from the unconscious man who is gushing blood all over. Blood was coming out of his mouth like crazy, he was like a sink that was turned on, the blood just kept flowing everywhere out of his body. I couldn’t even start to imagine if this man was still alive what he was thinking and what excruciating pain he must be in. We heard the paramedics say that he needed to get to a hospital quickly. The jet skier was still laying there lifeless. The bleeding had slowed down. People had started to clear off the beach, but many were still there watching this terrible scene take place.
The ambulance showed up on the beach a long four hours later. The new paramedics hopped out of the ambulance and quickly rushed over to the lifeless jet skier. They were too late to save him. I was in a state of shock of what I had just seen in front of my very own eyes. I wanted it all to be a dream and wake up from it right then.
Later I found out that the man had fallen off of his jet ski and slammed his head into a coral reef. He had cracked open his head and broken a lot of bones. He messed up his body really badly. This accident is now a memory inside of my head, it’s like a tattoo engraved into my brain. That tattoo will never come off, it’s stuck in my head forever, and I will never forget it.
After we had left the beach then we went to our hotel and my parents talked to my sister and I about what had just happened. They told both of us that the man was dead and that he was then going off to a better place. They also explained to us what really had just happened and that we weren’t ever going to talk about that incident anymore. My sister and I asked them a few questions on what happened to them because being a little kid at my age which I was around seven years old or so, I didn’t really know what’s going on is all that I saw was this man who was bleeding all over and I was told that I wasn’t aloud to go in the water anymore which at my age is a big deal not to be able to play in the water. Both my sister and I were pretty shook up from the incident. The rest of our trip was happy no more bloody bodies just nice villages and nice safe places. We stayed in Puerto Rico for another five to six days. We had many more fun adventures and exciting trips to different places. This trip has changed the way that I think about life and death. It has helped me realize that life is a very short thing and that every day we all wake up and can open our eyes and brush our teeth and walk to the bus, and when we are all playing sports or doing anything that involves moving we take it for granted every time. We never think about how fortunate we are for being able to talk, play and even eat on our own.