My bite is worse than my roar.

When I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to watch that much TV, which was a good thing; it forced me to actually go outside and play, something I loved to do. Nowadays, I sit in my room with my curtains drawn, swaddled in blankets and a hoodie regardless of the weather. Not nearly as healthy as my childhood activities.


My family was also in a much different situation: we only had one television in the house, much simpler than our current three. So if I wanted to watch something, not only did I need to have "TV time" left for the day, but the TV itself needed to be free. Being the youngest member of the family, I was at the bottom of the food chain, so to speak; if my sister wanted to watch something, she had the power to take over the living room by force. We never really fought when we were younger, and we're as close as a brother and sister can be to this day, but I choose to believe that she enjoyed tormenting me as a child. The major weapon that was employed against me was tickling, but she sometimes branched out into the classic physically-move-me-to-another-room-and-lock-me-in-there-despite-my-constant-blood-curdling-screams-and-begging-for-mercy technique. I tried to fight back as best I could, but it's hard to defend yourself when you're five and a 13-year-old's tickling is bringing your bladder closer and closer to emergency release.


So my tiny, single-digit-year-old self wasn't strong enough to outright overpower her. Maybe this is how I became more of an introverted, planning-type person; my attacks needed to be covert and unexpected. After what was probably a couple days, but what felt like years, I had created some semblance of a plan in my underdeveloped mind. What I was specifically going to do, I wasn't sure; but I knew I needed to strike when she wasn't expecting it. One day, the opportunity presented itself. 


She was lying on the couch on her back, and since it was the 90s, she was wearing some form of a belly shirt; this was exacerbated by the fact that her arms were behind her head, pulling it up a little bit farther. I was off in a corner playing with my dinosaurs, silently watching, waiting for her attention to shift from how annoying my guttural growls and roars were to the new Boyz II Men video playing on MTV. I thought to myself how ironic it was that she was the one watching TV this time around, unaware of my imminent attack. Except MTV was way more boring than The Busy World of Richard Scarry, so her multiple affronts on me were worse than my simple plot for revenge. I was more than justified.


Noticing her revealed stomach, the plan that had been floating around in my mind suddenly became grounded; I knew what I had to do. With a devious smile on my face and a charging shout that would put Braveheart to shame, I ran forward and bit down on her stomach with such vigor that my attack was more effective than I ever thought it would be; almost immediately upon contact, the skin of her stomach broke open, creating a sizable wound that I was sure my dinosaurs would be proud of. Her screams of pain brought me back to reality and out of my state of euphoria, followed by a quick flurry of arms hitting me in retaliation. Minutes later, she was on the way to the hospital with my dad while my mom spent a gratuitous chunk of time explaining to me that it was not okay to bite people on the stomach, something that I did not understand or agree with, followed by cries of wondering where she had gone wrong with me.


I don't really know when or how I decided it would be fun to start biting people, but this is my best guess as to when it began. After having broken the skin of my sister's stomach and subjecting her to a very painful tetanus shot, I got the taste for blood and began to seek out any opportunity to strike again. More than convinced my razor sharp fangs were more than a match for my sister' brute strength, I spent hours stalking her, pretending I was a velociraptor hunting down my wounded prey. I pounced only when I was sure her guard was down and I had a chance to rip a generous portion of flesh from my unsuspecting victim. Much to her benefit, the same opportunity never presented itself and a short decade later, I realized that biting people was not a socially accepted behavior and decided to grow out of my "LOL I'M SO RANDOM AND WEIRD" phase, something that I have come to loathe and pretend never existed. 


But it was all worth it. After my mom was done lecturing me about how I can't bite people and that, for the thousandth time, I'm not a dinosaur, the living room was empty; the television was mine. My sister has forgotten the lesson I taught her that day, or maybe she never understood why I thought it was a good idea to bite her stomach and send her to the hospital, but I knew. You don't get between me and something I want. And five year old me wanted to watch Sesame Street.