For my birthday, which was yesterday, I gave myself the gift of no longer running for the subway.
I wish I could say I came to this decision 1. based on ideals about either a) leaving early enough not to need to run for the subway or b) some sort of well-developed thoughts about whether saving two minutes is really important, or 2. because of some critical junction of age (no running for oldsters!) and technology (perhaps it isn’t actually useful, in the end, to know exactly when the train is coming)…but really what happened is I tripped on the sidewalk (it may have been damp, it was definitely dark, but I’m fairly certain Occam’s clumsiness was the root cause), tore the knee of my jeans, slightly bruised the heel of my right hand (I just typed “heal of my write hand,” which sounds more optimistic), and absolutely destroyed the heel of my left hand, by which I mean there’s probably still a flap of skin several centimeters deep on a Brooklyn sidewalk four days later.
I would say it was a face-palm of a move, but it was more accurately palm-to-concrete.
Also, although my jeans saved me from going to a wedding next weekend with a skinned knee, my knee does resemble nothing in the world more than a plum.
There was a guy walking down the sidewalk towards me when I took my flying leap, and as I lay there trying to get my bearings, he…kept walking.
Fortunately, as I was holding my palms up to the ethereal lights of the subway (having missed the train that I was running for, but getting another one fairly quickly, which is just one more reason not to run) – checking the level of swelling on my left hand-heel, which looked like it might actually burst and was bleeding all over itself and my other hand – a man across from me pulled out a paper towel and offered it to me while saying kindly, “I noticed you were bleeding.”
Indeed.
My hand was NUMB, and after the initial sheen of blood was gone, the part that had made contact with the ground was still a deep red.
I’ve been impressed by the inverse relationship between [the decrease in how utterly abysmal the heel of my hand looks] vs. [the increase in the sunset-nature of my knee], and originally I planned on including photos with this post, but…I’ve learned over my many years that no one is as interested in gross things as I am (especially bruises. People watch other people pop zits on YouTube; surely bruises are less gross than that??). So I settled for texting two of my friends “Who wants to see something gross” and then minimally taking into account their response (“I’m afraid to say yes”).
And if I’m late over the next week or so, I have two very colorful explanations for why I didn’t take extreme measures to attempt to ensure my timeliness.
Happy birthday to me!
