My Shining

Nearly 5 ½ weeks ago I took a bad fall. Landed headfirst cheekbone down onto the ground. The impact was so hard I knocked myself out and without a doubt gave myself a concussion. What resulted in the following days (besides a killer headache) was an extremely swollen and slightly scratched cheekbone, a puffy eye coupled with some bruising (that eventually represented every colour of the rainbow at one point or other throughout the healing process). I can talk candidly about it now that my friends and family know, and now that I look almost myself again. However, 5 ½ weeks ago it was my dirty dark secret.

The Monday morning following my accident I of course had to go to work as normal. The night before (day one) I didn’t look too bad. My cheek was pretty swollen and there was slight bruising, however I iced it on and off all day so I figured by Monday morning I would be looking better. Oh how wrong I was. Nothing could quite prepare me for the image that appeared before me that morning. I looked like I had been in a fight and lost. My eye had puffed up while I was sleeping and the bruising had grown, leaking under my eye and all around the lid in a perfect line of deep red as if I had intended for the colour to be there. I cringed and thought how the hell was I supposed to get on the bus looking like this? But I did, head bowed down, trying to hide my horror beneath my hair. No such luck. Instead, I looked more convincingly like the battered wife everyone thought I was. You could almost hear the gasps, and my cowering character only helped to confirm their suspicions. It was quite embarrassing and I am not easily embarrassed.

Arriving at work was even more fun. I was greeted with many ‘oh my god’s’ and ‘what happened to you?’ I also got a lot of ‘If you need to talk’s’ and ‘are you sure you really just fell?’ It’s sad to think that society has degenerated so badly throughout the years that the immediate reaction of seeing someone with a black eye is that they must be abused. I used to box a couple years ago. It was full contact kickboxing and I got the odd fat lip and a sprained finger, but never did I get a shiner. I suppose they wouldn’t have even believed me then if I had.

I was happy when the day was over and figured tomorrow would be better. It would be day three since the accident and it would start to heal. Oh how wrong again I was. If the horror that befell me Monday morning after seeing my reflection in the mirror was consistent with a B grade movie I had now graduated to the likes of The Shining. My bosses comment that it would get worse before it got better was bang on. Damn him, I looked like Frankenstein except it wasn’t Halloween. The swelling had not gone done, and the red bruising had now entered the spectrum of the rainbow. I was a walking piece of art, a walking piece of insecure art. Once again, as I boarded the bus I held my head down but I didn’t try to hide behind my hair. Instead, I had it tightly pulled back into a ponytail. I fell. I had nothing to hide.

The reaction at work on day three was more of the same. We had a full branch meeting scheduled that day, ironically a once a year occurrence. My timing was impeccable and everyone got to see me in all my glory. I laugh at it now, but I suppose it wasn’t very funny. That day while taking the metro home, the train came to a sudden halt, lurching everyone who was standing forward, and one young lady into my lap. She apologized profusely and we laughed, because everyone was fine. Then she looked back at me in a double take, having just noticed my face and gasped. “Ça va bien?!” Reaching forward in a gesture of good faith and compassion. "Oui, ça va" I responded with a big smile. Another set of people going home and telling their friends or family- you should have seen this lady on the metro, poor thing, her boyfriend must beat her she had such a black eye.

The rest of the week continued in the same fashion and by Friday my shiner had thankfully shrunken down 50%. I was hoping it would have been gone by then, but I had also hoped that it would be gone by now yet I still have remnants. I hit myself good. The shiner is gone but what remain are a small lump and a very tiny scar from where I had the scratch. (You will be pleased to know mom that the lump is also going away and I am sure one day so too will the scar. )

When I arrived at work in the New Year, a co-worker I hadn’t seen in at least three weeks greeted me. He looked over at me and said, “My god, you still have some of it left”. “Yes, Philip” I responded, showing him the small dent that appears over my cheekbone when I smile. He said it was like a dimple, that gave me extra character and laughed. Because that’s what I need, more character.

So if there is any moral or point to telling this story except to laugh at my stupidity, reserve judgement the next time you see someone with a beat up face. There are a million ways to get a black eye, only one being from contact with a fist.

When a bad hair day can really get you down.

Have you ever had one of those days when all you could think about was going home, putting on your fat clothes and curling up on the sofa with the remote? Well, I had one of those days last month shortly before Christmas. It was a Friday and I was having a bad hair day. My clothes felt tight and I was wearing a different perfume than usual that was making my skin crawl and agitating my senses. I just desperately wanted to go home, shower, change and drink a beer. Work was busy and stressful and I had to stay late so a co-worker kindly drove me to the metro. He dropped me off at a different station than the one I usually take, but I was happy, because it was a direct route to the bus I needed to take home. I would get home quicker than if I had followed my normal commute; light at the end of my otherwise gloomy day.

As the metro stop came into view I noticed flashing blue and red lights. I said over to my friend, “I hope that doesn’t mean someone jumped.” “Nah” he responded, “It’s before the actual Metro”. And indeed it was. We pulled up in front and the emergency vehicles were behind us on the corner, so I grabbed my things, said goodbye and hopped out. My co-worker drove away and I entered the metro station, or rather a blockade of people, held back by a yellow and black caution tape barrier and three police officers. In the chaos, I asked the nearest person to me what was going on. She said the metro was closed and they didn’t know when it was going to reopen. ‘Great. Just my luck’, I thought. ‘Now what I am supposed to do?’ I was in the middle of nowhere Montreal at a metro station I was completely unfamiliar with, with no other way to get home. I thought to call my co-worker back, but then decided against it. He lived in the north, why would he drive me to the south. I had no other choice but to stay where I was.

The police officers instructed us all to go outside and wait for the special buses to take us along the metro’s route. I have experienced in the past that it is usually quicker to just chill out and wait for the metro to reopen than to sit in traffic on one of those buses. However, my desire to go home was too great, I had no patience left in me to calmly wait. Not to mention they weren’t providing us with any kind of time frame, something that they usually do so obviously this was a fairly serious closure. I looked over at the kind lady I spoke to before and we both shrugged our shoulders. She asked me where I was going and I said to the south shore, she happily responded that she too was going to the shore so we partnered up and went outside to find the special buses. No matter what age, the buddy system never fails.

Outside we went, and down fell the rain. A cold thundershower was exactly what the day ordered, especially with me sporting around my company’s laptop. There we stood in the pouring rain, waiting for a bus in what we later found out was the wrong line. We were told the line we needed was over on the east side of the metro building so off we went. There must have been hundreds of people swarming around these buses like pigs at a trough. People were squeezing there way into the back doors while others were properly entering at the front. Everyone was pushing and shoving and many were cursing. It was a completely ridiculous scene. My new buddy kept insisting that it felt wrong to her. She was convinced that the direction the buses were going was not correct. I couldn’t help her either way, as I couldn’t tell what was up from down at this point. We decided to leave and check out the other side of the building. At this point what did we have to lose? It looked sceptical as there was no one waiting on the west side, but we quickly asked someone and after learned that we had finally found the buses going south. One quickly came and we boarded it immediately and without trouble. Seemed no one was interested to head downtown that night. Lucky for us as we were able to comfortably find a seat and get warm.

My hair had gone from bad to dreadful, all tangled and dripping wet. My pants were soaked and my shoes had leaked in water. But I was thankfully sitting down on a warm bus, going in the right direction. I got to learn all about my buddies life (a quite interesting one at that) and she in turn got to learn a bit about me. It took me 2 ½ hours in total to get home and when the bus finally did take us to the metro it was still shut down (something about a water main break… riiight).

It seems I had for once, made the wise choice.