Written while on the Amtrak coming back into Boston

“I’m feeling faint from blood loss.”

I’m writing this on the train because when I get off the train, I’ll be trying to navigate through vast swathes of people back to my apartment. I’ll be walking right into the Boston Marathon—not into it, but like in it, ya know?—and once I get home, I’ll be getting cute so I can join in the festivities. That’ll probably end with me falling asleep at five p.m. and waking in a saliva-damp haze at 10 p.m., by which time the moment for blogging will have passed.

So now is best. I only have shitty Amtrak Wi-Fi right now, so I’ll have to upload this when I’m home, which brings us back to the original problem of the saliva-sleep. Whatever. C’est la vie.

Easter was this weekend, and if you don’t follow me on Twitter you didn’t see my hilarious retweets. I mean, I didn’t do anything except retweet something that someone else wrote that was hilarious, but still. Gary Janetti, a writer, had a series of tweets centered around “Jesus’ Gay Friend,” which is both the most hilarious angle to take and also skewers exactly how dramatic it is to gather all your friends for a last supper, fake your death and then resurrect a few days later. STUN.

Yesterday, after a large diner brunch, my mother, sisters and I were sitting outside, sweating in the heat at our patio table. We had fixed the umbrella that morning, making sure it was nestled in the brackets and flush with its cinder block base. The wind was blowing softly, and I was working on an article.

Suddenly, the umbrella flared as a gust of wind whipped underneath it. The pole, set so painstakingly in place by me and my mom, began to lift with the pressure. As the umbrella wrenched itself free, the glass table surrounding it broke into a thousand-thousand pieces and rained, tinkling, over my lap, legs and the deck. My laptop dropped to the floor, yanking my earbuds out of my ears with it.

Everything happened both so quickly and so slowly—silence deafened me as I stared dumbly at the glittering glassine chunks in my lap. Slowly, we moved away from the table. I lunged for my laptop and set it carefully on a nearby chair before picking up my iPhone off the ground. My LaCroix—Pamplemousse—could not be saved and was buried under essentially a sand dune.

“Are you cut?” my dad asked, brought outside by the deafening crash. “No, no,” I assured before I actually looked down past my shorts—dusted with glitter (glass)—and realized that my legs were scored with pinpricks of blood. I was the only one bleeding—blood dotting my slippers and beginning to run softly down my legs.

(At this point, the train pulled into the station and I was right—I didn’t finish it. It’s now 11:43 a.m. on Tuesday)

I stood, frozen in place, because every step led to slight pinpricks as the glass shards whispered, “I’m here!” It wasn’t the big chunks of glass in my slippers that scared me. It was those little shards that were tangled in my leg hair, or taking up residence in the folded-up cuffs of my shorts. My upper thighs were speckled with small lacerations and glittery little teeth—it was almost like the glass was saying, “Maybe if you weren’t wearing such short shorts we wouldn’t have cut you up here.” Being slut-shamed by pre-sand is never a good idea.

After I waddled away—having been combed over by the spout of a vacuum—and got changed, I then had to go out and help my family clean up the mess. In a blood-stained white t-shirt, gym shorts and big Timberland work boots, legs covered in dried blood, was the most masculine I ever looked, and will ever look. So I spent the rest of the afternoon of Jesus’ a-rising squatting, using a spackle to flick chunks of glass out from in-between slats of weather-beaten wood.

“I’m feeling faint from blood loss,” I joked from my deep squat, joking but hoping against hope that someone would be like, “Oh you should sit down!” No such luck.

So now I’m sitting in a glass-enclosed box of the law building, with a “I’m Healing Here!!” Band-Aid, a nail broken from where I stabbed myself with a fork while doing dishes, and numerous mental scars from being with family for any amount of time. So that’s fun.

I think the lesson here is 1) Never go home for a religious holiday weekend, 2) Don’t fuck with umbrellas, and 3) Never go outside. Bubble-boy it forever.

This was the worst blog post ever, but whatever, it’s done. HOPE YA LIKE IT.