DANCING FLAILING IN FRANCE
She barely made it up the damned stairs, even though she wasn’t carrying her usual bags along with a stuffed backpack. Her legs weighed a ton and were reminding her that she’d just walked over 18,000 steps during the ‘school field trip’ with mostly twenty-somethings. Most of those taken had covered cobblestone streets and crumbling ancient bridge debris on steep hills.
Amy was cursing herself that walking up three flights of stairs made her winded. Four weeks of tackling them a few times every day in her apartment in France hadn’t yet wiped out the many days at home totalling 8,000 steps daily was a feat.
Finally she made it to the uncomfortable sofa and plopped down, remembering too late that the bottom cushion was as old and worn out as she felt. Her ass hit hard and her compressed lumbar region compressed some more. “Jesus!” she cried out as her purse leapt out of her hand and across the room to slam into the one glass she hadn’t put away before she left that morning.
She didn’t even watch the shattering happen. I don’t wanna look. I just wanna not walk anymore. I just wanna…
Her phone woke her up at 4:42 am. Groaning, she reached to see who the hell was texting her at that time in the morning. But she already knew it had to be someone from home; she was now living nine hours ahead of most of the people in the world she knew, and some of them still hadn’t figured out things.
After she fixed a minor emergency at home, Amy shed her clothes in a weird dance into her bedroom and fell back onto her slab of a bed and her smaller slabs of pillows. Why the hell are pillows in France square and lumpy? “Shit! Now I’ll never get back to sleep.” She groaned in self-pity and performed her useless ritual of making her pillows sleep inducing.
It was in these times that she wondered what the hell she was doing in France. She missed her comfy bed and her snuggly cat in the morning. She missed her big sofa and her big-screen TV for watching her Warriors kick ass. She missed feeding the birds and her favorite squirrel Sassy.
She missed the easy life. The one where no thinking or inordinate planning was necessary to just do the usual daily things. She missed…..
Lying on the bed with her eyes wide open, she realized that she was doing it again. She could hear Linda Ronstadt belting out “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me” as she stuffed a mangled square pillow imposter over her face.
Get a grip, Amy. There’s nowhere you’d rather be and you know it.
With an eye roll and a smirk, she punched the faux pillows into submission.Tomorrow she’d be in class, faux conversing in French with classmates from at eight countries NOT hers.
Stairs and square pillows be damned! How freaking lucky am I?