The tree was the most familiar thing to me when angry. More so than my room or the slam of my door. I stalked up the hill to it’s weathered bark and with my eardrums throbbing from the sound blasting from them I started the climb. 

It had been a little while since my last climb. I was not an expert climber, by any means, but I knew this particular tree. We were old friends. In it I was comfortable to get high up, thirty or thirty five feet up with ease. 

My converse shoes must have squeaked against the moss as I scrambled up the trunk after picking my way through the tangled ropes of roots mossy from all the rain we had been having. 

If Meteora, and Hybrid Theory and a dozen other songs had not been playing so loud in my ears maybe I would have heard the squeak of wetness between my shoes and the mossy bark? 

Maybe I would have hesitated as I scampered between the branches and heard the creak of the branch? 

I was twenty or so feet up in the air reaching up for the next branch when I felt the jostle beneath my feet that dislodged my footing. I suddenly couldn’t reach above me for the next branch, I had lost several precious inches of height. 

Now tight roping I panicked, felt the pit of my stomach turn cold and then hot and then as I wobbled and felt the first inches of my fall the air turned to poison in my lungs, burning. 

I remember hitting the branch with my torso and feeling the smack of the tree’s solidity with my ribs, my fingers scrambling to grab a hold of something solid. There was nothing. With my one of my headphones out of my ear now I strained to stay on the creaking branch. I had just enough time to realize I was going to hurt a lot before the branch cut itself loose from the trunk of the tree.

I had no choice but to go with it. 

We hit the roots below from a fall of twenty feet or so, I felt it snap up into my body from my left foot up, I fell back, felt the wind knocked out of my lungs, and rolled to a stop.

Looking up at the branches and the now gruesome looking wound on the tree trunk where the branch had snapped off I was offended by the Maple. What a traitor. 

In my ear Chester shouted things I wasn’t listening very closely to, to be fair I was distracted. 

I was doing a bit of inventory. So far my hands were moving, and I could shift my jaw, so at least from the waist up I was somehow functional…

Wary I raised my neck just enough to look at my feet splayed on the damp leafy ground and sparse grass of the park, watching to see if my shoes would shift when I told them to. 

On one hand I was relieved. Both my feet waved back at me at my request. 

On the other hand I nearly screamed. My left foot felt like it was in actual fire.

It took me two hot seconds to know I had broken my leg, and it was bad. Very bad.

In the ambulance they pumped me full of something that made the pain fade and my voice sound deep and thick.

I spent a week dizzy and numb, eyes half mast waiting for the surgery that would put the metal into my leg so I could still use it. Plates, and pins, pain and painkillers.

My father showed up one day at the hospital with Minutes to Midnight, and I realized then that Linkin Park was probably one of the few things he knew for sure would cheer me up. There were other blatant things about me that my friends knew, but he had picked the sure fire one. 

(Little things give you away)
All you’ve ever wanted
Was someone to truly look up to you
(Little things give you away)

It made me feel curious to know he had noticed this one thing about me. Almost glad for the fall.

I listened to Minutes to Midnight for months straight, confined to my bed, eyes closed trying to dream up stories and books to write, even as the painkillers also murdered my ability to dream.

Even now when I put that album on I shift my leg uncomfortably, feeling the metal pins and plates that still hide beneath my skin.