Insomniac Sketches #2

I was sitting in bed writing at, oh, 2 in the morning. I'd let the cat in to cuddle, and he was sort of doing slow laps around the bed, sniffing about, looking for a comfy spot. So there I am, tapping away, and he's scrunched himself up at the foot of the bed, where the comforter is in a heap, just beyond my feet. I hear a trickle of something. Figure it's the vent on the floor to my right, adjusting itself. But then it continues, and it sounds even more ominously like liquid. Then it hits me. The cat's got his butt facing me, and it looks rather…poised. I lean forward, pull the comforter back, and see that he's pissing on it, in a puddle, right there at the foot of the bed in which I am sitting. The nerve!

The cat is ejected from the room, the comforter bunched into the laundry bag, a replacement comforter (thank goodness there is one) laid out on the bed. I don't really sleep.

Cut to this morning. I'm barely conscious. But I need to do laundry, now, so I decide to do all the bedding, too — make an event of it. There's a laundry room and a gym in the basement, so I can do what needs to be done to the sheets while I do what needs to be done to my body. Perhaps working out will help wake me up.

While the wash is running, I get on one of the human hamster wheels. Twenty-eight minutes later, I dismount, sweaty, not really any more awake than I was when I started. Ray Barretto is doing "Indestructible" on my iPod, and I'm distracted by the salsa beat. I exit the gym, walk in the direction of the laundry room, go to push open the door, and BAM!

Have I mentioned before that I'm a big klutz?

I hear a crack in my nose. Things go a little blank, then swirly. It takes a few seconds before I realize I have hit, at full speed, a glass wall. With my face. I look around quickly to see if anyone's noticed, but the one girl in the laundry room has her iPod on as well, and the one girl in the gym couldn't have seen because the blinds are drawn. I run my tongue across my front teeth, checking to make sure they're all there. They are. I swallow, testing for blood. There's none. But I can feel a rapidly increasing pressure at the bridge of my nose, and I reach up and can tell that it's already swollen. I do a gentle little dab, dab, squeeze, squeeze with my fingertips, to test whether things feel…broken. It seems not. But there's definitely a lump, as well as a strange, tingly numbness to go with the rising headache.

My brain is now on a haywire form of autopilot. My first concern is the laundry, not my nose. I need to get the bedding into the drier as quickly as possible so that if my nose has swelled into a globby mass, I can scurry away without anyone noticing, but still be assured of toasty sheets. The rational thing would have been to go back into the gym, do a nose check in the mirror, and then, if things seemed amiss, to have covered my face in an ice pack and perhaps gone to the hospital, laundry be damned. But even if it did appear that I needed treatment, I reasoned, I couldn't leave the laundry, the down comforter, sopping wet. A potentially broken nose could wait half an hour. Right?

The laundry dried. Because I'm stupid that way, I did some yoga stuff while I waited that made my face throb even harder as all the blood rushed to my head. Luckily for my nose, it wasn't broken. At least, I'm pretty sure. It's got a dime-size pink bump that may turn purple or some other groovy pastel in the coming days. But thanks to the miracle of Vitamins (ahem), left over from my recent foot surgery, I'm now happily blank and swirly, without the pain. And my sheets are so fresh and so clean, I may actually be enticed to sleep tonight.

Comments

[Dariush]

Eviction for the General.

And sheets that are so fresh and so clean, clean? Nothing quite as dope.

/obscure?

[Phillip Blanchard]

Thank you for making me feel better about myself.

pjb

[Wayne]

I too have walked into glass--an unmarked door within a transparent wall on the front of a federal office building. The door was so heavy that some people couldn't open it alone. The late-afternoon sun had all but blinded me as I rushed across the lobby toward the double-parked van after making a delivery.

This occurred about 5:05 p.m., so plenty of staff members saw it. Some screamed. The skin on my nose split from just below the brows to the tip--a bloody mess that would be reopened several years later by brass knuckles.

This was years before you and I met. Don't worry--my schnozz looked just as bad before the glass encounter as it does now. Yours will no doubt heal and remain lovely.

[Andy]

I'm going to need some new posts from you. You're the worst enabler... ever.