Sunday, January 01, 2006

Wake Up Covered In Broken Glass Day!

The bedsheets will be soaked in blood and gin and your face, neck, and upper body will be covered in a senseless pattern of lacerations. These last eighteen months, bottles of gin have been the only things you've been able to coax into your bed. They make you feel safe the way a strange man snoring on the next pillow never could. You used to complain when you'd go out with your friends to bars that all these men keep hitting on you, and the only thing you want to bring home is that bottle of Bombay Sapphire back there behind the bar. Your friends finally told you that maybe you should follow your instincts and see how sleeping with some gin works out.

"But maybe pour all the gin into an empty Evian bottle," your best friend Tracy once said. "You shouldn't fall asleep when there's glass in the bed."

Tracy is a pediatrician and she married an anesthesiologist when she was 28. She's very wealthy and though you and she are still close, she has a whole other set of friends who are all Moms and professionals. You are her mixed up friend. Her young friend is what some of her Mom friends call you. You have a brunch date with Tracy today but you're going to call and cancel. You don't feel like letting her know that she was right about sleeping with glass. Which means you're going to have to wait until all the cuts on your face and neck heal before you meet up with her again. That might take a while because that one cut looks pretty deep, and might call for a visit to a doctor.

You could maybe tell people you were attacked. Spend today thinking about how you want to deal with this. Then think about the fact that one of those shards of glass was stuck in your neck not too far from your jugular vein. Since you slept through the glass breaking and slept so deep you didn't even stir when you rolled into all the shards, you could easily have slept right through your own death. You need to get a strong plastic bottle with a secure cap. And you need some more gin. Yours is all over the bed. Though you could wring a lot out from the sheets, maybe enough to fill a highball glass, it will be mixed in with all your blood and months and months of bed-sweat, so it'll be really weak.

Happy Wake Up Covered In Broken Glass Day!