I'm a little teapot. Again and again.

This post is dedicated to Emily Williams. She will be laughing maniacally by the end of it.

Last week, I fell down. Or up. I fell up a flight of stairs. Outside. In a dress.

I have taken some pretty spectacular falls. Most of them involve stairs, but I am scarred by the memories of all of them. Like in high school when I stepped off the sidewalk and my leg buckled underneath me and I went down in a pile and pretended to tie my shoe but Lanny Webb walked by me and said “I saw that.” That shit stings in high school. Or the other day when I tripped coming out of the movie theatre and did those several thunderous steps forward where you try to regain your balance before you fall on your face in public. Don’t even get me started on the spills you take in northern states when the water on the ground freezes.

On Friday I was summoned across the street to solve a problem. I was clothed in a shirt, brown gauzy skirt and some sandals. This trip across the street required me to exit my building and climb a flight of stairs. In my haste, I missed the very first step, and spilled up them. I stood, climbed three more and spilled up them again. I moved too quickly after the first fall to remember how I landed. For the second fall, I recall clearly because I remained that way for several seconds. I was on my stomach. My left leg had straightened out, the toenail polish scraped away, along with part of the skin on my knee. My right leg was bent like a frog underneath me, and this was the leg that was holding my weight. I was on my left elbow, which was skinned and my right hand was patting the sidewalk above me. I rolled over to a sitting position before I stood up, dusted myself off and completed my climb.

My knee, three days post-tumble. I'm the only 30-year-old you know who maintains skinned knees.

The doors behind and below me were glass, and thankfully there was no one at the door or in the hall to see my bitsies when I fell up the stairs in a skirt. On my second fall, I was able to see up the top of the stairs onto the sidewalk above. I can only thank the mother of the prisoner from Dixon Correctional who was sitting on a park bench at the top of the stairs enjoying an afternoon smoke for giving him the manners not to guffaw at a girl who has just tumbled up a flight of concrete stairs and involuntarily deposited herself practically at your feet. He did not stop what he was doing to help me, but they are not permitted to touch us (or be alone in a room or elevator with us.) Our mutual understanding not to make eye contact was concrete, so to speak, and I brushed right by him scurrying through the crosswalk and he offered no condolence or commentary.

My knee is getting better. My elbow is barely worth mentioning. The damage to my ego remained throughout the weekend and it is only this morning that I am able to share my humiliation, but only because I think falls are funny. If you fall down in front of me and do not land with an alarming burst of painful noise, I will commence uncontrollable laughter. I will help you up, remove the dirt from your skin and inquire into your wellbeing, but you will not understand me, because I will be laughing too hard to be coherent. I do have friends who are offended by this, but I assure you it is not malicious or intended to be insensitive. I maintain that my reaction is involuntary. I cannot help it. I have a seizure of laughter.

Fair is fair, though, so I do expect to be laughed at when I fall down. In the spirit of fairness, I am not upset that it has taken Emily Williams and Kiyana Patton fifteen minutes to read through the three previous paragraphs to arrive at this one, because their eyes filled with tears in the third sentence and every time they try to read forward, they go blind with laughter. Your friends are supposed to keep you humble, and mine do.

And if my husband is over there in Iraq reading this aloud to his friends, which he's prone to do, he's in big trouble.