Rose
I hang a hard left and exhale hard ready to put my 1987 Honda Civic into my parking spot in the underground garage for the night.
The car is eight years older than I am even though I feel like I’m closer to eighty right now. Eighty as in the amount of hours I’ve already put in at the hospital this week…and it’s only Thursday.
And that eighty feels more like dog years since a large chunk of it was spent in the E.R.
So much for the idea of moving to the big city so I could “live the life” drinking cosmos at swanky speakeasy bars while classy gentleman fought over who was going to pay the bill and who was going to get the honor of spinning the green eyed girl in the red dress on the dance floor.
But right now the only thing spinning is my mind. The only thing green is the UFO, a.k.a unidentified phlegmy object, on my hospital smock, and the only thing red is the blood that somehow is splattered on the side of my cheek.
Nothing beats the rush of saving a life, but I really need to work on obeying safety protocol or it’s going to be me on the table with some disease I really don’t need right now.
And speaking of rush I wonder if I’m going to be able to grab my groceries and rush to the elevator and into my apartment before my bladder explodes.
But when I look at my spot I get a whole other kind of rush.
“Nooo,” I moan as I bang my palms on the steering wheel. Some jerk, with a Ferrari no less, has decided tu casa es me casa and has totally taken the parking spot I pay for each month. And to add insult to injury he’s removed my Confucius parking placard that says Man Who Want Pretty Nurse…Must Be Patient from the wall too.
“Uhhh!”
And right now my patience level is at zero…and apparently so is my gas tank.
I feel the engine kick and my car stalls. I throw it in park, grab the bag of cold items from the passenger seat and make a break for the elevator.
As I watch the numbers go up I hum Bon Jovi’s Bad Medicine…my go to self-prescription when I’m about to have a nervous breakdown.
The elevator dings as I reach the penthouse and the second a crack of light pushes its way through the slow opening doors I push my own way through into the hallway.
And run head first right into a brick wall!
Who put a wall in the hallway? I think to myself as I feel myself falling backwards.
I brace for the impact of the back of my head on the tile and can already count the days I’m going to miss from work and the dollars I’m not going to make with rent quickly coming due.
But much to my surprise the impact never comes, unless you count the tight grasp of the oversized calloused hands on my arms and the feeling of flying.
It takes me a second to realize I’m not flying, but I am horizontal with my feet off the ground.
“Put me down!” I yell at about the same time my carton of ice cream lands on the tiles a good five feet from me spilling my Chunky Monkey everywhere as I fight my bladder not to do the same.
As soon as I feel the balls of my feet on the hard tiles I beeline it for the door and jam my key in the lock…the wrong lock of course. I jerk it twice willing it out of the deadbolt hole before shoving it inside the keyhole in the door and then throwing a shoulder into the door and quickly there after my body into the bathroom.
At least something goes right as I execute “the move,” where you pull your pants and panties down all at once as you’re sliding towards the toilet seat, to perfection. The second my booty, which has yet to see a ray of sun all summer, hits the cold porcelain I realize I made it.
And then I also realize…hey that guy was pretty hot.
Really, really hot.