When I was four years old, I "escaped" from my parents and managed to leave the park we had gone to for a nice day out. At the time, I didn't realize I had wandered much farther than I should have, and that led to something I now fear to remember: an out-of-control child who thought he was invincible.
Somehow, I ended up genuinely believing that running across what I now know was a street—without checking if anything was coming—was an excellent idea worth trying.
In my mind back then, the approaching car was simply part of the game I was playing. My logic was simple: if the fast, colorful thing touched me, I'd lose; if I touched it first, I'd win.That was the level of reasoning my four-year-old brain was capable of.
The concept of "death" didn't exist for me, and if it did, it was just as distorted as my understanding of danger. I knew danger existed, but I had no clue what actually counted as dangerous. So of course I didn't recognize how harmful 1,862 kilograms of metal moving toward me could be.
Fortunately, a man who—as I learned later—was about 183 years old (though at the time he was "only" 173) happened to see my improvised attempt at suicide.
And despite that absurd age, his mobility didn't seem affected at all. At least not enough to stop him from interrupting my unintentional death attempt.Seeing an elderly man on the opposite side of the street jump toward me faster than I could react, and moving in ways I'm sure I still can't replicate, was strange back then… and maybe it still is.
I was confused: I didn't understand why this old man had jumped on me or why he dragged me back to the sidewalk. My confusion only grew when he explained everything to my parents and they scolded me for "playing tag with the multicolored fast thing."
I swear that, at the time, I considered that the worst injustice of the day. After all, hadn't we gone to the park to play?
Many uneventful days passed… until I got sick and my parents took me to a Chinese healer nearby. According to them, it "wasn't serious enough" for a hospital. As if they understood how horrible it was to be sick for the first time.
Finding the same old man who'd gotten me in trouble standing there as I entered the consultation room only added salt to the wound. Being miserable and then seeing someone you disliked was not exactly comforting.
Later I discovered he had an undeniable reason to be there: it was his clinic, and I was the patient. That discovery changed my life completely… though that would be getting ahead of myself. At the time, it just meant someone could be more than just a bastard.
The old man eased my suffering and earned the right to be re-evaluated by my personal standards. My interest in him grew from then on—so much that I started visiting him to ask how he could be so fast. Even now, I'm not sure whether the answer he gave me was true or just a joke.
Eventually, I witnessed something I can only describe as a small flying green thing that talked. Anyone else would've found that strange, but I hadn't lived long enough to know what counted as strange, so the small flying green talking thing convinced me to tell the old man first before telling my parents about my new discovery.
When he returned and I explained what I'd seen, he told me what that creature really was. Apparently its name was Wayzz—a name I still think is incredibly cool.
Of course, telling a four- or five-year-old the real truth—that Wayzz was something close to a god embodying a dangerous concept—was not a good idea. So the old man twisted the story and said Wayzz was a flying little helper who assisted him in healing people.
Much later, when he finally told me the truth, I almost thought he had lied. But remembering it… Wayzz really did what he said: he helped, basically in exchange for snacks as his salary.
Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked.In the end, I didn't tell anyone about Wayzz, and my relationship with the old man became a lot closer.