I'm leaving for Seattle in two weeks and I can't walk.
To further the inconvenience of a resurrected back injury, I prematurely sold my couch yesterday. Which leaves me... the floor. The supercomf wonderful sleeper sofa Mon Frere intended to purchase from me did not fit up his staircase. There is this thing with Cambridge/Somerville staircases -- these skinny Victorian houses with narrow flights. Ruby's staircase is downright uterine; coming down the stairs and twisting through the vaginal pink ribbed walls you are deposited into the bright light of the next floor where someone is waiting to hang you by your feet and slap your bottom.
So I sold the couch last night, and now I wait apprehensively for the phone call telling me that our lovely college student will be coming to claim her wares. I feel quite blessed that last night she only brought her mother with her, which meant they couldn't rightly carry the behemoth sofa down two flights of stairs -- it's a sleeper with a queen size bed and weighs more than my car -- and I wasn't about to help out since I can barely stand. So the couch remains, and I remain on said couch. It's a flawless spring day with the sun and breeze and cloudless sky and I am medicated and inert, packed ass-to-elbows in ice, mourning the loss of my spine.
It is the Donovan curse -- a slim and wavering spine, vertebrae stacked like a haphazard Jenga puzzle, begging to crack at any moment. My back has picked better moments to slip a disc or two, and this is not one of them. Not only am I enduring the inadjectivable physical agony, but I am rooted in one place, forced to survey the litany of undone things in the apartment as the calendar hangs itself right in front of me. The anal-retentive control freak in me is squealing in torture. There are unlabeled boxes to attend to with a sharpie! There is a yard sale to organize! My socks are on the floor of my bedroom because I sold my bureau!
My mom's been watching QVC. She sent me a pack of those space-age shrink wrap bags for clothing. There's a vacuum involved and my pillows are now the size of novels. Playing with the pressurized suckers has been my favorite part of packing so far. I'm trying to figure out what else I can put in there to shrink. Like Eddie with the cantaloupe in the fruit dehydrator. Maybe I should try water balloons.
I don't know how two slipped discs and herniated vertebrae are going to fare for 70 hours in a car. Or hiking to the Grand Canyon. Or stumbling about on Cobblestone in New Orleans. Oooh -- we've got big plans for NOLA. My oldest dearest friend is in New Orleans, and I've been inspiring (threatening) her to finish a proposal she's working on so she can come play with us in her city of jazz and crawdads. I have also inspired (threatened) her to join us for a leg of our cross-country trip. We will be scooping her and her boyfriend up and forming a caravan en route to the Grand Canyon.
And I figure between Amanda, Rogers, and Mon Frere, they should be able to carry my stretcher just fine.
Maybe I'll get one of those lofted rooms on stakes that royalty used to ride in, poles on the shoulders of my friends, carried regally through the United States. That might be fun. I'll have to look into that.
RSS: subscribe to feed