I saved my friend’s life as a kid, which endangered my own. I wrote this in a question here like, years ago…don’t know which thread now. But this is what happened, it was Winter and my friend and I were playing around on the frozen river. On the shore there was one of those big sewer things that dumps sewer water into the river. Since it’s warm in there, the water around it wasn’t frozen. My friend decides to go right on the edge of the ice near the sewer mouth and I go, dude don’t go there, the ice will break. But she just goes, no it won’t, goes over there, crouches down on the ice and what do you know, it breaks and she falls in.
At first I try to shout encouragements at her like, come on, you can do it! as she’s trying to climb back out. She was holding on to the edge of the ice but couldn’t do much more, so I just said fuck it, dashed over there, grabbed the back of her jacket and yanked her out. So, I was pretty lucky the ice didn’t break under me. If we both were in the water, I think we might be dead today. We had on our big puffy winter coats, that shit absorbs water like mad. And I don’t know how long you can just sit in water in the middle of Winter before freezing, even if we had something to hold on to. This was right besides a busy bridge, so maybe someone would have seen us eventually. Hell for all I know, someone did.
So when she was out, we bolted to the other side of the river and she hugged me haha. Then we went to this kid’s club thing where you can hang out, play air hockey and shit. She didn’t want to tell her mom what happened, because her mom didn’t want her to ever go play near the river. The mother actually lost her first daughter, who drowned in the river, so…she dried her clothes in that club, and we never told anybody. She didn’t tell her mom, I didn’t tell my dad.
But that was a close call for both of us, I knew it then, and I know it now.