Thursday, November 08, 2007

This morning, for the first time since I moved to Seattle four-and-a-half years ago, I fell down my hill.

It has actually been a while since I have fallen all the way down, although I've certainly done a number of remarkably clumsy things in the interim. (The finger that I sprained fighting off a bear with a gun that was holding a number of limbless children hostage only recently finished healing, for example.) I've walked up and down that hill in heels and in flats, in rain and snow, drunk and sober, and have not, until today, left any of myself behind.

I walked out of my apartment this morning in flat shoes and jeans that already have a hole in them from skinning my knees last year. The bass line of a song that I shouldn't even be listening to came through my headphones, and whether I was pushed by the memory or slipped on the rain-slicked leaves is anyone's guess, but down I tumbled. I landed on the same knee--apparently, I catch myself with my left knee, or maybe that one's just bigger than the other one--and slid on the top of my foot downhill until the stairs built into the sidewalk stopped me.

Amazingly, the contents of my purse all stayed put, and I'm not terribly banged up; just a bruised knee and a skinned foot and an aching calf. I'm also not a very quick thinker before my morning caffeine, so rather than going back home and bandaging myself up, I wobbled pathetically off to work, little droplets of blood beading up on my foot and running down into my shoe.

Glad I got that out of the way before the ice and snow show up, really.

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