What happened instead was far from glamorous. The tip of my tailbone came down on the hard ground with a heavy thunk, and every ounce of air in my lungs escaped in one thick howl. I slid lifelessly to the end of the tarp, and lay there motionless. My cousins formed a circle around my limp, ungainly body, not breathing, my eyes staring up at nothing in the sky, while my aunt rushed to blow air in my face. I started breathing eventually. Nothing was broken. I was just an idiot who jumped tailbone-first onto a patch of solid earth. “Why would you do that?” my aunt screamed at me. “What were you thinking?” But I didn’t have an answer. My brain just had it in for my body, I guess.

Indeed, not even a year later, I started climbing a small bush—a bush! a piece of shrubbery!—during an innocuous game of tag, immediately fell backwards, and broke my left elbow in two. Some say I was pushed. But that’s only because they were trying to find a logical explanation where there wasn’t one. My body didn’t follow the rules of logic, after all. The doctors said I’d need pins in my arm, and frankly, I welcomed them. Anything that replaced my body with machinery seemed like a good idea when my actual flesh was doing nothing besides getting itself into constant trouble.

A few years later, on the very first day of summer vacation, I was riding a scooter—not a motor scooter, mind you, just a run-of-the-mill, push-it-with-your-flat-foot scooter—and my brain decided it was a good idea to throw the Frisbee mid-glide. So I threw it, immediately tossed myself off balance, tried stopping my fall with a folded fist, and landed on my wrist. I felt my arm crunch beneath my weight.

“It’s not broken,” my cousin assured me. “I’ve seen a lot of broken bones, and you’re fine.” Never mind that my forearm flopped like jelly when I tried to fix my glasses. But it turned out my cousin was right, in a way. It wasn’t broken, at least not all the way through, and a doctor spent an hour shooting me with numbing agents and twisting the bone until it broke cleanly. “It’ll heal better this way,” he said between twists. But I knew I’d be back again, if not for this, then for something else.

In fact, I spent almost every summer in various stages of recovery from one recently incurred injury or another. One summer, I stepped on a piece of glass and sliced open the heel of my foot. Another summer, I stepped on a beehive. Another summer still, I stepped off a curb and somehow sprained my wrist.

My body would always find a way to betray me.