Dear Reader, let me snatch back my words. Earlier, I compared my tale to the Tragedy of Icarus. This was not wholly accurate, because you will note that Icaraus’s primary tragedy was that he was an insipid little bitch who couldn’t get his act together.
Icarus never caught himself midfall.
I, however, was a better class of person teenager. Less defeatist, perhaps. More spite-fueled, certainly. More arrogant? Conceivably. I would argue this arrogance was justified by what happened next.
I have tried several times to use language to convey the exact series of physical situations which transpired. Words fail me. I instead chose to download a series of drawing apps, spend a half hour trying and failing to find the eraser tool on each such apps, delete all the apps, and download a new app made specifically for small children ages 3 and up, which I found equally unenjoyable but marginally more usable. I then spent multiple hours drawing this series of vignettes…
I am not actually an artist I spent 2 hours drawing this, it belongs in the Louvre.
Suffice it to say, I caught the motherfucking door. No, I don’t remember how. It was the emotional equivalent of discovering midair that your seesaw is missing a very integral set of screws, and then watching your body (compelled by the survival spirit of a particularly acrobatic ancestor, presumably of the ape variety) leap into the air of its own accord, do a double backflip, and with supernatural grace land daintily on both feet in the nearest sandbox without disturbing a single grain of sand.
That was the emotional equivalent. The physical equivalent would have been more along the lines of watching someone trip on their own feet, and fumble briefly before regaining their footing.
Also, I stubbed every single toes in my possession.
After the Great Fall Minor Stumble, I found myself right back down the staircase, more or less exactly where I started. It is only now, years later, as I write this, that another myth comes to mind–that of Sisyphus, doomed forever to roll that punishing boulder up and up the mountain.
I would like to point out that Sisyphus was also a little bitch.*
Seriously, friend. At some point you gotta stand up for yourself and–this part is crucial–stop pushing your boulders.
I had not yet reached that point. Possibly because standing up for myself would, at this moment, entail an argument with gravity. I had very recently lost just one such argument; I was not eager to pursue another.
But by the stars, I was close.
I decided to make one final attempt. If yet again the door preferred to continue its journey to the ground floor–that was where we would part ways. A strange partnership, ended at long last.
(On an unrelated note, based on personal experiences I can guarantee that Sisyphus spends a lot of time crying. Don’t you dare judge him for that.)
To resume our narrative: I, very gently and very carefully (without scuffing the floors, Mom if you are reading this I did not scuff the flooring) played a strange game of Rotational Chicken with the the door, wherein I got closer and it backed away (rightfully suspicious of my motivations) and eventually we ended up back where we started at the top of the stairs. See Figure 1 (above). The whole experience could have been much worse. The door was, miraculously, unscathed. I was very much scathed and also, at this point, scathing mad. Spitting fury. The wrath of angels seeping out of me like fumes. The devil took a vacation to Georgia, in case I came a knockin’.
There was a lot of scathing going on, is the point, and I was also in no position to actually do anything about it. I was physically unable to throw a tantrum, due to a prior engagement with the forces of physics. I was very very close to crying, but didn’t dare risk it bc I needed my eyesight to avoid tumbling down the stairs all over again (probably, this time, with the inevitable SPLAT!)
Also, I had an impending migraine.
But more importantly, I had the fucking door, I had 30 minutes before Mom got home, and the previous Fall Stumble had knocked loose from my skull possibly a few molars but more significantly the very obvious and readily apparent valuable knowledge that the laundry room down the hall had a little attic that was in fact the perfect storage location for a whopping great, mammothly gargantuan, morally atrocious solid oak door.
I delicately adjusted my sneakers (throbbing), resituated a few beach towels into pertinent areas, and off we slid.
*An interesting detail is that Sisyphus was actually the inspiration for whichever schoolyard bully coined the childhood endearment ‘Sissy’. Not many people know or believe this, but I insist it is true!
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