Help talk:Monkey

With a title like that, I bet you’d just expect another badly written trollpasta. Trust me, I’d love to write that, or anything else. But I can’t. This actually happened to me and I have to get it out there.

I was eight years old at the time. My parents were out on a date, and my sister was supposed to babysit me. Unfortunately, her definition of babysitting involved sitting in her room on her computer and ignoring me. I was left to my own whims. Spongebob is a very whimsical show. I had the TV on Nickelodeon before I even knew what I was doing. Spongebob episodes were playing in a marathon. I was happy to watch as many of them as I could before my parents came home. I had a much longer attention span back then.

Four episodes had passed before that episode started, so I was pretty much out of it. I think my brain was too fried to apprehend what I was about to see. I didn’t feel that feeling of impending doom that I should have and still feel. The episode’s theme song was not warped, and the title card was normal. It read “You Have To Move On.” I was excited as I hadn’t seen that episode yet. The episode started with Spongebob getting ready for work. He was running late and forgot to feed Gary. Also, in his haste to get to the Krusty Krab, he left his door open. A “Two Hours Later” timecard popped up after Spongebob left. Gary was looking down forlorn into his bowl. His stomach growled. The camera panned over to the open door and Gary was off with a “mew”. We now got a view of the outside. A bowl of snail chum was seen across the street, which caught Gary’s attention. Slowly, he made his way towards it. It was almost comical how slowly Gary moved across the street. Then, out of nowhere, Gary was flattened by a speeding boat. That was certainly not comical. The ghastly crunching noise it made me jump. The camera then went up to a bird’s eye view of Gary’s splattered remains. How can I accurately describe it? Okay, picture the most disgusting roadkill you have ever seen. Gary was like that, if not worse. The camera stayed focused on that shot for the rest of the episode. For twenty minutes. My eight-year-old self was reviled. I immediately turned the television off and went to cry in my room.

Why does the episode stay engraved in my mind no matter how much I try to forget it? It was the title card. At first, I thought “You Have To Move On” applied to Spongebob losing his beloved pet. But the more I thought about it, and as the years passed, the less it made sense. The episode never showed Spongebob coping with his loss. It just showed Gary’s corpse. I realized that the title card’s message had to be for me in some way. That was odd. I hadn’t experienced any kind of major loss in all of my childhood. I had almost forgotten all about it until my two-year-old son was hit by a car.