Falling Hard

As my Facebook friends will confirm, I fell today. Hard. On ice. I immediately picked myself up, dusted myself off and posted the non-event to Facebook as any self-centered person would do. See, it's ICY up in this piece. I placed one snow-boot-wearing foot on the sidewalk and BAM! Pharon Eats Pavement. I only now just got home and took my tights off to get a good look at the carnage. Hmm...all the damage must be subcutaneous (what?) because given the amount of pain I felt and the number of swear words I yelled at 7 a.m., the bruising should be way more life-ruining.

I started thinking about how clumsy I am. And yeah, I'm extremely clumsy. If there's a patch of ice, I'll find it. If there is uneven pavement, I'll trip over it in my Rollerblades. If there is a stairwell, I will slip and fall down it on my shins. These are all very real things that have already happened to me.

Probably the worst day of my life in terms of falling in public came when I worked at a Mexican restaurant in college. There was a bartender there that every girl just drooled over. Everyone wanted to impress him. I ran in to the restaurant on my day off to talk to my pal Taylor. I blah blah'd with her for a few minutes before The Bartender came in. I got nervous, talked really fast and then was all "Well, I better go!" So I started running out of the restaurant (so much for playing it cool, Pharon). As soon as I hit the tiling in the entry way, my feet decided to get in a serious fight with the ground and they broke up. I fell, ass-over-tea-kettle, while Bartender and Taylor looked on. As Taylor described it, "You were there, and then, you just weren't!" Luckily (?) I had fallen behind a half-wall, so I army-crawled out of the restaurant and limped all the way home.

So Cool.

Later that year, I slipped on some ice in the Ped Mall and fell (again!) in front of a captive audience. Somehow, I gracefully managed to land with my butt straight up in the air and my elbows placed directly into the icy cement.

Even later that year, I found myself in a pub with stairs. I was so busy yelling at someone over my shoulder that I failed to notice the staircase in front of me. I accidentally took one giant step down 8 stairs and managed to recover by simply skidding down the 50 steps on my shins. No one noticed a thing, but the next day, my shins looked like Rihanna's face. (Too soon? Whatever, she doesn't take it seriously, so neither will I.)

I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe I have a depth perception problem or balance issues. I simply can't stand on two feet for very long. During the last rain-then-freeze weather, I was happily walking in my rain boots before I tripped over a twig and nearly chipped my teeth on the sidewalk. Last year, I was running down the stairs too fast in my last apartment and fell so hard that I had to ice my ankle for days. Running for the bus a couple months ago, I hit an errant pebble and my heel collapsed underneath me as a I crumbled to the ground. I fell once while walking in my own bedroom and skinned my whole face up. I tripped while playing soccer in high school and managed to sell it hard enough to earn me a free kick. I FALL. A. LOT.

So I don't know why I was so surprised this morning when I re-met my old friend Pavement. It's like "my thing." Some people eat healthy, I eat cement. That cold, hard smack of humility hit me hard and honestly (and sadly), it just felt right.