My Black Eye

I woke up the morning after running into Houdini feeling a bit out of sorts. Nothing serious. Just the aftershock of unexpectedly running into someone that has seen you naked and vulnerable and once made you cry.

Maybe more than once.

I took a shower and decided that regardless of how I was feeling on the inside, I was going to look amazing on the outside. I walked over to my closet, pulled out my favorite gray sweater dress, then reached up on my tip-toes to pull down my gray, suede shoe boots.

The box was about a quarter of the way out when I could tell it was empty. Naturally, I pushed it back into place.

Unfortunately the box that was precariously perched on top of it, didn’t slide back into place. Instead, it came crashing down on me; the corner hitting me right in the eye.

Did I mention the box contained a pair of five-inch wedges? I don’t think I realized just how heavy those suckers were until they clocked my in the face.

I ran to my bathroom to assess the damage. My eye was red, and starting to swell. The box had broken skin, only a small amount, just under my. I gently touched the afflicted area and cringed.

It hurt. A lot. As you may recall, I had a date that night with Ringo. I looked at my swollen eye in the mirror and wondered if this was the universe’s way of telling me something.

As I dried my hair, my swollen red eye slowly turned to a swollen black eye. It wasn’t super black – just a little black, I told myself. Plus, I had all day to bring the swelling down. For those of you that don’t know me personally – I have super cold hands. Which is bad because whenever I go to get a manicure the woman painting my nails always exclaims “your hands are so cold” and then, sometimes, she laughs. However, when your shoes attack, freezing cold hands are a bonus and they provide you two ice packs conveniently located at the end of your arms.

I did my make-up, got dressed, and went back to my bathroom for a final look. Even with my hair all fussed up and the 30 pounds of concealer, all I could see was the gash under the swollen, purplish skin around my eye. I was suddenly no longer in the mood for my super cute sweater dress and decided to change.

Now, you know how when you have a zit, it's the only thing you can see but then you are talking to one of your friends and you say something like “and then I woke up this morning with this huge zit in the middle of my forehead” and they respond, what zit? And they mean it. Because you think it is huge, meanwhile no body else notices it.

That is what I was hoping was the deal with my eye. I was hoping that because I could feel it and I knew it happened that whenever I looked in a mirror it was all I could see, but in reality it wasn’t noticeable at all.

That dream started to fade when I got on the subway and I noticed people looking at me and then quickly, guiltily looking away. Of course, maybe I was just being paranoid.

Then I got into work and the first words out of my co-worker Rhoda’s mouth were, “what happened to your eye?”

Still, the piece de resistance (as the French would say) had to be on my way to my date with Ringo. I was running to catch the el and bumped into a woman. She immediately turned on me, looking like she was about to yell, when she stopped and simply said “damn.”

Apparently, my icepacks hands didn’t do the trick.

Four hours later, I was finally home with a pack of frozen edamame on my face and a glass of wine in my hand, wondering if it was just too dark in the bar for Ringo to notice my eye or if he was just being polite by not mentioning it.

I also wondered if my mom would believe my story when she saw me later that week (she did, by the way, but then, she is just as klutzy as I am so she probably had something similar happen to her once).

I also wondered if there was a way I could blame my black eye on Houdini.

But mostly I wondered how the universe was going to top this in 2011.