Two days ago, I fell down.
It’s been a long time since I’ve fallen down, but it turns out not much has changed. It’s still embarrassing, even if no one sees you. Your brain still replays the event, for hours or days. You still feel a mix of rage, self-pity and humility, a trifecta of emotion meant to keep you stewing in the experience for more time than seems humanly necessary. And there’s the pain.
Had someone been tuned into my wavelength the morning of my fall, they probably could have warned me it was coming. “Everything you’re doing is laying the groundwork for something bad to happen,” they might have said. Though I probably wouldn’t have listened.because I was in a huge hurry.
My husband and I were rushing to get to an 8:30 a.m. yoga class, so I was feeling virtuous and smug. The dog wouldn’t potty, so I was irritated. And I wasn’t dressed warmly enough to be walking him, which made me impatient. When Theo got onto a scent and bolted after it, pulling me with him, I hit the two-inch high concrete driveway divider with the toe of my sneaker. After which I was airborne.
The mind is an amazing instrument, able to process zillions of pieces of information in a single second. In the moments between the fateful meeting of my toe with the concrete divider and my knees with the driveway, I did a lot of thinking. Some of that thinking took the form of questions about what I had to look forward to, physically. I knew this fall was going to hurt really badly, but exactly how really badly was it going to hurt? Would my back, prone to disc slippage, go out? Would anything break?