My Tongue was cut off

When I was a kid, I thought I would end up being a goalkeeper because of how good I felt I was back then at the goalpost. I remember my dad telling me that being a goalie was good but it wasn’t really the best position to be at in the field. He said all goal keepers do is throw themselves to the floor every time and he was right but you see, that wasn’t what made me stop being a goal keeper. What actually did the trick was something far more worse and something that if I had known would happen, would have made me stay as far away from the goalpost as possible.

A part of my tongue got cut off.

Yup, it’s that crazy. A part of my tongue literally got cut off and that was what ended a career that hadn’t even began yet.

It all began one afternoon while I and my brothers with some friends decided to play a game of football known as ‘score and rest’. It was a game whereas as you score, you go outside to rest and just wait until everyone but the last person has scored. The last person gets disqualified for not being able to score a goal and then the rest of the team comes back in again and start the whole process all over again until everyone eventually gets disqualified and there’s just one man standing, the winner.

I had volunteered to be the goalkeeper for this game and everything had started pretty well until one moment when I bent down to get the ball. I saw one of the players running towards me but thought he would stop the moment he realize that I already got the ball but I thought wrong.

Just as I dived for the ball, the player also attempted to kick it. He struck, not the ball, but my mouth and somehow I ended up having an incomplete tongue.

That pretty much ended not just that game, but my entire career of being a goalie. I remember not being able to properly eat for weeks. That was when I realized how important my tongue was.

My dad ended up beating the hell out of my brothers because they were there when it happened and I remember every time my mom gave me food and I rejected, not because I wasn’t hungry but because I couldn’t eat it, my dad would beat them again.

He said that would make them do better in the future and it did because they never allowed me get close to a goalpost ever again not like I wanted to myself.

Once bitten, twice shy.

_{Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen}