I don't remember a lot about the day my life changed—drastically and disastrously. I have no real memories of the actual lightning strike. Even the time before it is a little hazy... I was riding my bike in a raging thunderstorm between classes at the University of South Florida. The USF campus is too big sometimes... I don't see how they expected us to get from the McKesson building where all the history classes are held to McCabe Hall for my electrical engineering class in 15 minutes—there are two major 4 lane roads dividing campus into 3 main sections... with the light timings, 15 minutes was possible if you caught everything perfectly, otherwise you were in the land of the fucked.
Professor Donaldson was a Grade A dick, too... He was one of those door locking assholes who didn't give a flying fuck why you might be 30 seconds too late—30 seconds were 30,000 milliseconds too many. My World History to Circuits and Signals run every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were harrowing dashes where I crossed against the light every single time to make up 90 seconds. It was bullshit, but it does explain why, in one of our typical south Florida afternoon showers I was going balls out on my bike to get to class, regardless of the lightning and thunder literally shaking the earth around me.
And that's all I remember. They tell me I came to a week before, but I honestly don't remember the first 7 days in the hospital... I just remember being in pain when I came to... the look on my mother's face... if you've ever seen your parents with that look, you know... you know something serious has happened. You know something's never going to be right again. I couldn't feel much of my body except... fire. I felt like I was on fire from the inside... my head hurt, my face hurt, my chest hurt... my spine, if you can feel it, it hurt. My left leg hurt.
The lightning, they told me, entered through the top of my head, and exited through my left foot—which is how I stopped at red lights. Right foot up on the pedal ready to pump when it turned green OR the traffic broke for a moment, and left foot on the ground for balance. I looked like a monk on LSD... a huge patch of hair burned from the top of my head where the lightning struck me... a crown of hair that didn't burn around my ears... like a skinny Friar Tuck.
They kept me on morphine for weeks. I guess two or three. I couldn't walk when they moved me out of ICU... everything hurt. That's what I remember most... Hurting. Death would have been better for me I overheard one of the nurses say when I was kind of in between awake and asleep once... and at that time... I agreed.
I didn't recover quickly. Life didn't return to normal for me. I actually needed help learning to walk again... I spoke like a stroke victim at first. I hated my life. I wanted to end it. But time heals all wounds, they say, and a little more than a year later I was enrolled in school again. Still a freshman... I hadn't completed any of my classes that first semester for obvious reasons. But I was alive... I was walking... My brain healed—most of it I guess. I didn't slur words... I wasn't slow on the uptake. I learned to do everything I could do before.
It was during the last bit of my recovery when I began to notice how different the world was, and how differently the people in it treated me... how they responded to me. Sometimes when I looked at them... in their eyes... in their expressions... I could practically hear what they were thinking. It's like I knew what they were going to say before they said it. Some people could be so unbelievably two-faced. My therapist told me I was simply resenting the setback... my injuries... my recovery... that I was projecting what happened to me onto those around me. I didn't think so.
The first indication I had that something -fundamental- had changed in me was in one of my last therapy sessions. Susan—she insisted that I use her first name and not call her Dr. Henninger, was explaining how our time was coming to an end... how I would face my transition without her. She had helped me all she could, she told me. She wondered if there was anything else, I needed before we wrapped... before my insurance wouldn't pay her anymore. It was extraordinary that she managed to get two extensions for my sessions already.
Susan was the kind of woman who polarized a lot of guys... plain, stern face, butchy haircut, but kind of fit and with a huge rack... you just couldn't ignore her tits. It's like, maybe she's ugly as fuck, but her body just made you put her in that "yeah, if I had the chance, fuckin' a, I would" pile.
And all I could think about when she asked me what else I needed as I prepared to return to university... to reintegrate with my friends... to life... all I could think about, semi-jokingly, but kind of seriously was, 'yeah... bust your fucking tits out and I'll feel like our time was worth something.'
The slight headache I pretty much lived with since the lightning strike, grew in strength and I grabbed my temples from a bit of shooting pain—but Susan... her face drained of emotion... she looked at me and said, "David?" and then she said, "but I can't!" and then in the swiftest motion I've ever seen a blouse unbuttoned, her fingers went racing down from her neckline to her belt and she pulled her blouse open for me... her 40" bust line on full display to me in a simple but obviously heavy duty bra as she breathed, awkwardly heavily... her breaths matched mine... like, our chests heaved at exactly the same time... then she slapped me, apologized, and ran out of the room.
I had never been more confused in my life. I left her office... didn't talk to Jenny, her receptionist... I just left and went outside where my mom was sitting in her car waiting for me... and I went home. Home, with the full memory of Susan's huge tits burned in my brain.
I probably jacked off ten times over the next few days to the thought of Susan just ripping her blouse open in front of me... I wished I had seen more... I wished my headache wasn't so vision-splitting when it happened. But that event alone was just the start... and just the beginning of what would happen over the coming weeks with the return of school.
They thought I should take a PE class to keep my motor skills... improving. I needed the elective... there was no better time. It was a "lifetime sports" class where we'd spend a few weeks on things like tennis, bowling, basketball, volleyball, and kickball in a mixed gender setting. Nothing too competitive, nothing too strenuous... it was a perfect way to get three hours under my belt... to at least complete some classes for the first time since starting university the year before in addition to the usual prereq maths and other engineering basics.
Class had been going for a couple of weeks now and I had made a few friends. This one guy, Mark, was... he wasn't coordinated. I mean, I was the lightning strike victim, but this guy... he looked like he'd been in a series of serious storms since the age of three. Nobody was expecting Pete Sampras or Cristiano Renaldo in these classes, but this guy... he was terrible... at everything we did. And though most people were lighthearted and non-serious about our performance on any of the sports or drills in the class, this one big-titted, blonde sorority chick just never missed an opportunity to scoff at him when he fucked up.
Mark was a physics major... Mark was never good at sports, nor would he ever be... especially with the shit-kicking he took from people like Jennifer. The quiet ones are always trouble, though... and Mark... Mark was an odd one, even by my standards. He used to say the darkest shit to me whenever Jennifer or one of the other two sorority sisters in our class teased him. I mean, come on... it's not high school anymore... fuck. But they were relentless.
One day he told me that what Jennifer needed was to be put in her place. I asked him how that would happen, not imagining a way in which the privileged bitch could ever suffer in this world with our rules and our system set up to just... just reward her... and he said, "Someone will get enough... someone's going to rape that stupid bitch and make her swallow his cum. I'd do it... I'd do it and put it up on SoFlaNet to get back at her!"
SoFlaNet is the campus intranet... kind of a wild west... like an internal reader edited message board or something. Campus didn't regulate it that much... wanted to promote the free exchange of ideas... let the students moderate it. So half of it was posts about weed and "mind expanding experiences" and half of it was Wokebook, where we argued over how best to be better than better and other inane bullshit.
