Early this evening, my flatmates and I were hanging out in my room and our common room, reveling in various states of dinner and debating our options for a night out, when we heard screeching tires, followed by the yells of what sounded like several grown men. Thinking that the time had finally and inevitably come when we would have to witness the gruesome death of one of the free-running daredevils of the Conway Front Yard Parkour Club, the three of us ran to my room's comfortably open windows to see what had happened. The casual mood of the evening went temporarily and abruptly out the window (pun both unintentional and distressing, but I can't think of a better turn of phrase) when we saw that a flashy white sports car had just collided with a bicyclist. After a few brief moments that left us, the bikers and drivers, and the small crowd of parkour guys who had seen the accident standing around in stunned silence, it became clear that the biker was shaken, but okay. He stood up and walked back to the sidewalk unaided, and all of us unwitting spectators began to return to what we were doing.
Still reeling somewhat from the shock of watching an accident unfold outside our door, though, my roommates and I lingered for a moment at the windows. (Windows which, to remind you, were a solid ten or twelve inches open. Keep this in mind.) As the people on the street returned to their business, one of the parkour guys noticed us watching the scene.
"Hey ladies!" he yelled.
Uh...is he talking to us? People from the outside can talk to us? I thought this was like a two-way zoo kind of thing, what is going on?
As the above thoughts raced through our heads and out of our mouths, our new friend continued talking.
"You wanna give me your number?"
Ya know, my gut says no on this one, but - "We don't have phones! Sorry!"
Unsatisfied with this answer, though, parkour guy decided to take our conversation to a new level: face to face.
"Eh, screw it," I'm assuming he more or less said somewhere in his barely audible mumblings, "I'm comin' over there."
I've described this before, but my roommates and I have always taken felt confident and safe in our disconnect from the street thanks to the tall, spike-tipped fence and sizable fire-escape-esque pit that separates our windows from the actual sidewalk. These obstacles proved no match, however, for parkour guy. Before we could even make sense of what was going on, our parkour friend had hopped up to and over the top of the fence and was making his way, monkey bars style, across the metal bar that connected the fence base to our building. He reached the end of the bar, and in classic "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission" style, reached out for the windowsill as he asked if he could come up.
The next thing we knew, this random man from the parkour troupe on the street was literally hanging from our windowsill chatting us up.
This is probably a good moment to reiterate to you all that I WISH that I could invent a story like this, people. I am 100%, positively not making this up. This is, unbelievably, my actual life.
Satisfied with our proximity at this point, parkour guy tried again. "So, you wanna give me that number?"
Like the safety-trained little darlings that we are, we repeated our insistence that we don't have phones. After all, that's, like...half true. Seeing that his initial plan was unsuccessful, our new friend moved on to a new tactic: settling in for a chat. "Do you mind if I just open this a bit more?" he asked. Before we could answer, he had pushed the window up another foot or so and STUCK HIS HEAD, SHOULDERS, AND UPPER TORSO THROUGH OUR WINDOW.
To clarify one more time, there is, at this point, a random guy from the parkour crew dangling from our windowsill, half of his body in our room, talking to us about our evening plans. He started with the standard "where are you from," spouting off the few random fun facts he knew about our various home states and trying to make sense of where we went to college before getting to the good stuff: what we were doing tonight. After small-talking and avoiding the subject for a while, we eventually dropped the name of a club some people were considering, earning a "that's a fun place on Wednesdays actually" from our new buddy Greg. We snapped an entirely necessary picture with our breaking-and-entering friend and sent him on his way with a half-hearted, "Yeah, see you at the club! Maybe!" As Greg returned to his parkour, we went back to our normal lives, shaking our heads at what is, without a doubt, the weirdest thing that has ever happened to us here in Conway Hall.
Obviously, as I'm writing and posting this new blog post at 11 PM, I decided not to go out tonight. (Surprise! I'll go out tomorrow?) But a couple of my roommates did, in fact, just head out the door in pursuit of the very club we name-dropped to Greg. So maybe this weird story will have a happy ending against all odds. Perhaps the tale of the parkour practitioner who's climbin' in yo windows, snatchin' yo people up, will even end in love!
Because oh yeah - did I forget to mention this part? Theoretically-creepy Greg here was actually really hot.
Just makin' some local friends!
I think we can all learn a few valuable lessons from this crazily improbable story. First, it can teach us all that, on occasion, you gotta open your hearts and your windows to the charming, attractive parkour guy from the street who so desperately wants in. And secondly? It shows us that my friends and I will go for pretty much anything if the involved parties are good-looking enough. Breaking and entering? I mean, only technically. We'll be shutting our windows before going to bed tonight, but Parkour Greg, we'll be dreaming of you.
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