Free Kick Me by Paul Feig

midsection. Boom boom boom.
    “Paul, I don’t know what you’re doing but please hurry up.”
    This time the feeling faded quickly. But it was now indelibly etched in my brain. And I knew it was something that I was going to make happen again, even if I had to dedicate my life to it.
    I got to the bottom of the rope and put my feet on the mat. As I tried to walk away, I almost fell onto the gym floor. My legs felt like Jell-o and I was having ghost pangs of the feeling. It was like my body was now vibrating slowly like a car that’s about to stall because of a dirty carburetor. I walked among my fellow students but everything was a blur. I had experienced something that felt almost religious in its scope and I was quite sure that no one else in the gym that day could even begin to understand what I’d just been through.
    A few hours later at recess, I decided to find out if I was the only one who’d experienced “the rope feeling.” I asked my friend Brian if he’d felt anything during his climb.
    “My hands really hurt after it” was all he offered up.
    “Didn’t you feel anything else? Anything that was really good?” I didn’t want to get more detailed than that for fear that I would be informed of some life-ending disease that had as its main symptom “an intense, pleasurable sensation when climbing ropes in gym class.” Kids were always interpreting any abnormality or injury I had as the tip-off of a fatal disease. Once I had a scratch on my arm and a kid in my class saw it. He told me that if you have blood poisoning, it looks like a red scratch on your arm that runs along one of your veins and when the red scratch reaches your heart, you drop dead immediately. Of course I spent the rest of that day staring at my scratch, convinced it was growing longer, and well on its journey to kill me. But as far as “the rope feeling,” Brian just shrugged at my question.
    “I didn’t feel anything. What did it feel like?”
    “I don’t know,” I said, trying to figure out how to verbalize it. “It was like I was floating or something. It felt really good.”
    “Huh. I don’t know. Maybe you have cancer.”
    The next day in gym, the rope had been put back up into the rafters and I stared at it longingly. “Can we climb the ropes again today?” I asked.
    “Paul, you were the only one who couldn’t make it up the rope yesterday. Why do you want to do it again?” Mrs. Handler said as she bounced a kickball, clearly more excited at the prospect of teaching us a new competitive sport.
    “I don’t. I was just wondering if we were going to do it again.”
    “Not today. We’ll try them again next Wednesday.” She then launched into a lecture on the fundamentals of kickball and I stood there trying to calculate how many hours separated me from next Wednesday.
    That night, I was watching TV in my usual position, lying on my stomach with my chin on my hands and my legs bent at the knees behind me, my calves and feet slowly moving back and forth. Then something strange happened. The rope feeling started to come back again. It wasn’t as strong this time but it was definitely creeping up on me. As I had on the ropes, I immediately froze. I stopped moving my legs. The feeling pulsed a bit, then started to fade. I was very surprised and stunned. What happened? I began moving my feet back and forth again and the feeling started to return. I stopped breathing, hoping that it wouldn’t fade again. I kept moving my legs and the feeling continued to grow. I started to move my feet faster, as if I were swimming in the air. When I started to go too fast, the feeling began to fade again. And so I held a steady pace with my legs. My brain was now beginning to overload with the joy I was experiencing at the return of my new best friend, “the rope feeling.” As the sensation built, my father walked in the room.
    “What are you watching?” he asked.
    At that moment, I had no idea what I was watching. I was numb with