The Strawberry Circle Incident (The Extended Version)
AKA That One Time My Cousin Almost Murdered Me Because of a Fruit
Remember the line “Stuck in the corner, between fridge and kitchen door. Strawberry circle, tracksuit sweater. How come you have not yelled at me yet?” from the love poem I wrote dedicated to my childhood? Ever since I wrote this, I know y’all1 have been dying to hear its backstory. Which is why I have decided to put a lil’ spin on my usual blog posts and provide you with less of a stream-of-consciousness type of thing, but rather, a full-length anecdote this time. Yay! Are you excited? Excited, that I am getting even more personal than I already have by recounting a REAL-LIFE incident of mine?2 Yes? You better be. Ok here it comes.
I had always been an anxiety-ridden child, imagining the worst possible outcome for each scenario in my life. Whether it’s about my mom not picking up her phone (she definitely got killed in a traffic accident) or me getting a slight sunburn (I definitely have skin cancer), l had been convinced that I could foresee the aftermath of every single incident.
Today, of course, I know that I can’t, but on a sunny day in May in the late 1990s, I was sure my cousin would end up hating me forever. Why? Because I had stained the back of his tracksuit sweater, thanks to my strawberry ice cream cone.
It all started when one afternoon, my parents, brother, aunt and uncle, along with three of my cousins and myself went to get ice cream. We had decided to drive back to our place afterwards, so we split up who would drive with whom. As I got in the back of our car, my mother put me in my car seat. While she was securing it, I was trying my hardest not to drop my cone on the floor, which is why I spread out my arms as wide as I possibly could. At that exact moment, my cousin jumped into the passenger seat next to me. In the process, he crushed my ice cream as he leaned into the back of his seat. With the weight of his body pressing onto my hand, I was still holding my cone, but quickly moved back my arm as soon as he leaned forward again. What I saw next, almost paralyzed me with fear; there was a huge, rose-colored circle visible on the middle of his dark blue Adidas tracksuit sweater. I was terrified. Not because he had ruined my ice cream (although that made me sad for a second), but because I was scared of his reaction.
My cousin is seven years older than me. At the time, he was the loudest, most rebellious and most mischievous teenager you could imagine. He was the type of kid every child would either look up to and desire to be, or be scared of because he was known for playing jokes on everyone. (All in good fun, according to him of course.) The smarter choice had always been to be his friend, rather than his enemy. Knowing the kind of person he is, naturally, I was convinced that he would get angry with me and start screaming within seconds. But he didn’t. Apparently, he didn’t notice what had happened at the same moment I did. As a result, the whole drive back to our place I had plenty of time to think of what to do as soon as we got out of the car.
The route from the ice cream parlor to our home usually took about fifteen minutes, yet to me, that car drive had felt like hours. In my mind, I scanned through all the possible actions I could take. “Should I pretend it wasn’t me? But what if he remembers that it was me who had the strawberry ice cream? Certainly, he will know, based on the color of the stain, that it was me! I mean, we were in the same car, he would obviously know it was me. Is it better to own up to it, and admit it was me?”
Once we entered our home, I knew he would notice the stain on his back soon. There was no way around this. After all, it was a warm day, so he would definitely take off the tracksuit sweater sooner or later. Not wanting to be present to witness this moment, I had decided to do the one thing I knew I was best at, which was hiding.
My favorite hiding spot was in our kitchen. I would open the door so wide, that I would be stuck in the corner of the kitchen, with the fridge to my right side, while holding onto the back of the kitchen door handle with my left hand. “What a great plan”, I thought. There I was, squatting in that corner between our kitchen door and fridge for what had felt like an eternity, when in fact, it had probably only been a few minutes. We were a full house of adults and kids, nobody would notice that I was gone for a while. Until someone would need something from the fridge, I suddenly realized. My mood shifted drastically.
My childhood anxiety came in a package of two. It also contained a tendency to overthink, so that is what I did next. “My uncle loves beer. What if he wants to get a beer?” I thought. “Or worse, what if it’s my cousin who wants something out of the fridge? He loves Milchschnitte as much as I do. He will definitely check to see if we have some in our fridge. What then, huh? What if he sees me hiding here? Without a doubt, he will know it’s me who is the culprit. I cannot act suspicious like that, can I?” As soon as I realized this, I left my hiding place immediately.
Once I got out of that corner, my remaining memories of that day are rather blurry. Though, I do remember that he did not notice the stain while he was at our home. I also remember that I kept dodging any sort of interaction with my cousin throughout that day, while constantly switching between the decision to tell him the truth and face the consequences, or to keep my mouth shut and pretend I didn’t know about any of it. I know I opted for the latter because I never told him, or anyone, about this incident for years.
As an adult, I remind myself to face my fears every now and then which is why eventually told the story of the strawberry incident to my cousin (last year, to be exact). Of course, he did not remember any of it. Not a single thing. Neither me acting all suspicious and hiding, nor his tracksuit sweater being stained. In fact, he could not even recall the day of us all going out for ice cream together. Turns out, I got worked up for nothing, as I had usually done in my childhood.
After all these years I am still perplexed that he hadn’t seen the strawberry circle on the back of his tracksuit sweater. I like to imagine that my aunt eventually saw the huge stain as she threw his clothes into the washing machine, but simply brushed it off as yet another part of her son’s crazy antics.
1 Shoutout to my three or so readers, I love you from the bottom of my heart.
2 To the best of my memory, that is.