I grew up in Texas A&M’s married student housing complex where in between each building there was this whole cinder block open are space that had a bunch of clothesline poles. Picture like 12 of those pairs of lines above but like two rows of six and each column about 2 ft apart. If you didn’t grow up with clothes line poles because you had fancy shit like dryers they were two T’s with steel cables running between them to hang clothes on. You could use a dryer but when married student housing is mostly full of international grad students who are cheap and from countries were dryers are for the rich you use clotheslines.

Point of this story is that clotheslines were fun. You see when you are a 8 year old version of me and the university decides to recarpet an apartment you go get your friends and tell them to bring the old roll of carpet to the clothesline spot. That’s when you use chairs and small hands to get this roll of carpet over the top of multiple clothesline poles. Once it’s up you roll it out and BLAMO you now have an elevated platform 6 feet off the ground that you can do whatever you want to on. It’s like walking on clouds but it’s old carpet.

Our game of choice was tag which on a big ass carpet platform didn’t leave you any place to hide or to run unless you wanted to jump off which at that point you automatically lost. This was pretty fun for a bunch of non american kids growing up in H. W. Bush country.  After a while things got interesting though because that’s when we found out how old this carpet really was. I don’t remember who it happened to, may have been the japanese kid or the brazilian but we were running around on top of this thing when a spot in the carpet gave out and a kid just straight up dropped through a hole. He was gone, we lost him to the underworld of concrete. We kept playing though because we are smart and just assumed that was a new added risk to tag. Never mind as kids dropped through new rips in the carpet they ended up bloody on the dark concrete below. The worst though is when you dropped while running perpendicular to the clothes lines, you would drop and get gut checked by a steel cable. If you were lucky you wouldn’t drop and could get back up. 

We played that shit at the end of almost every semester, that’s when students moved out. I lived in that apartment complex from preschool until 4th grade. I miss that place.