The One Where I End up in the Emergency Room

Today, a change of pace; a date where I am an absolute mess.

In case you’ve missed it, I have a penchant for wearing heels. High heels. Five inches or better. Three inch heels are flats to me. I am also quite tiny, so in situations where I desire to be the height of a normal sized person, say, on a date with someone taller than me, I don’t hesitate to wear the highest, most vertiginous heels I own. The added benefit of making my legs look amazing is just a bonus. But that also brings me to my next point; I love wearing dresses. Preferably as short as decency will allow.

This is important.

This particular early spring night, I had on a dress that started miles above my knees and heels that had me towering miles above the cobblestone streets of Georgetown, where I’d met Mr. Wonderful.

We’d started out the evening shopping for a shirt and tie for a wedding he was attending the following weekend once he returned to Chicago. If you know me, you know how much I love shopping for men. I have no idea why. But I love it. In many ways I find it to be an amazing aphrodisiac, picking out the clothes you will take off later. We flirted across the displays in store after store, playfully bumping into each other, whispering inappropriate things in each other’s ears, and cramming into dressing rooms so that I could watch him undress like the perv I am. After we finally settled on a combo that we both could agree on, we meandered down to a dark, cozy Italian restaurant and sat as close as possible to each other. I remember looking at him at one point in the evening, after he’d ordered us a bottle of wine, taking in his pale, golden skin and gorgeous smile in the candlelight, my eyes sliding over his lips and back up to his dark eyes, lined with densely packed, ebony lashes, and thinking to myself, I can’t wait for him to take this dress off me when we get back to the hotel. I threw my thigh over one of his, watching his thick fingers trace lazy lines up the inside of my thigh, and then looked up to catch him looking at me like he couldn’t wait to take my dress off either.

Oh, it was going down.

We polished off our bottle, fortified by plates and plates of pasta and cheese and bread, but were both still buzzed nonetheless. We figured it was probably best to take a cab back, rather than walk. Making our way back up the hill and to the main street, we decided, would improve our chances of getting a taxi.

This would wind up being the worst decision of the evening.

We were, tipsy, laughing too loud, holding on to each other too hard, and having to concentrate to ridiculous levels just to get a task accomplished. We managed to make it up the hill without incident, and to the corner of M and Wisconsin. We shuffled through the throngs of people also enjoying their Saturday night, not nearly as skillfully as we might have sober. After walking a few steps on the cobblestone sidewalk, I noticed a cab with the light on coming right towards us. I knew I needed to hurry before we lost the cab to someone else, so I grabbed Mr. Wonderful and yanked him hard towards the curb, lifting my arm and trying to flag the cabbie down.

At some point during my awkward, hurried shuffle to the curb, my heel slipped off a cobblestone and into a crack. Had I been a bit more sober, I likely would have been able to recover easily. But alas, I was drunk on Italian wine and sexual tension, and could not find my balance. In slow motion it seemed, I felt my leg crumple underneath me and all my weight lurch forward. I let go of Mr. Wonderful, hoping to keep him from going down with me, but instead letting go of the only thing holding me back from the car parked in front of me. Which I hit. With my head.

I slid off the car and fell sideways onto the ground. If you have never lain on the ground while dozens of feet shuffled past you, looking at the night sky and wondering how your evening could have gone so horribly wrong, then let me tell you, it is positively terrifying. I was well aware of the fact that at any moment, some passerby who didn’t see me Cameron Diaz myself into this car might step on my face and seriously hurt me. And also make me unattractive. Which, if not worse, is definitely the same. Yet, despite being aware of this, I could not make any moves to get up. That MIGHT have been ok, if not for the fact that the itty bitty dress that was so cute a little while ago was now around my waist, exposing my adult amusement park to the neighborhood. The good news is, I had on an adorable pair of orange and red panties while splayed out like a starfish. The bad news is THEY WERE LACE AND THEREFORE SEE THROUGH.

Mr. Wonderful lifted me gingerly from the concrete and scooped me up in his arms. He carried me towards the cab that I did in fact flag down before my face plant and placed me inside after the cabbie opened the door. Then they both hurriedly ran around to the other side.

“Take us to the hospital please!” he shouted at the cabbie.

In my mind, I was saying, no, I’m ok; I don’t need to go to the hospital. Because I was cool. I was conscious.
My face hurt.
But that’s totally cool.

Instead,  my protests came out sounding like alphabet soup, so I figured it was best that I let them take me on to the dreaded hospital.

The entire way there, Mr. Wonderful was trying to talk to me, asking, how do you feel? Can you see straight? Are you ok? I was fine. I was mortified beyond any comprehension. But fine, I reassured him.
MY FACE HURT.
But I was ok.

At the hospital, I stood on the curb as he paid and thanked the cab driver, and caught a glimpse of myself in the windows. My dress was ripped and dirty. My entire right calf was skinned. Somehow, my left boob, the unruly one, had fallen halfway out of my bra, giving the illusion that I had three breasts. I lifted my hair off my forehead, and saw blood forming a sizeable deep purple bruise on my already sizeable forehead. There was also what appeared to a red welt on my cheek in the shape of a cobblestone. I looked like an episode of SVU.

Now, my life hurt.

After I assured the concerned nurse at the desk that no, my boyfriend did not hit me, no, I was not sexually assaulted, I was just a drunk, accident prone ass woman who picked the wrong night to wear five inch heels and a dress, she told me they were going to need to run a battery of tests to make sure that I had not severely injured my brain in anyway. I recognized immediately that I was fine; if my brain was injured, then I could AT LEAST forget every mortifying detail of the last half an hour. But alas, I could not. We sat in the waiting room, me awkwardly laying my head in Mr. Wonderful’s lap while he put an ice pack on the knot forming on my forehead.

“This is not the way I intended to end the evening. Well, I did intend to end the evening with my face in your lap, but not like this,” I told him.
“Not exactly what I had in mind either. But it’s kinda romantic really.”
“What?! How so?”
“I’ve never had a girl fall for me so hard before,” he replied with a smirk.

Asshole. lol