Fragile

Alison's got to be sick of me poking fun at her for beating me up on Valentine's Day, so I won't do it here, even though she doesn't read my blog and probably never will. The fact is that she knocked a champagne glass off the edge of the bathtub completely by accident (while trying to move the flowers she got me for Valentine's Day out of my way), and by some strange happenstance, the glass just happened to fling directly into my eye in such a way that it both cut me and gave me a black eye. I can't really explain how, because the glass itself didn't even break, and it doesn't have any sharp edges. I bled a fair bit and although it's healing fine, my eye is still pretty bruised up.

The rest of the evening up until that point had been perfectly nice, with a quiet evening at my house relaxing and cooking dinner (a shrimp curry noodle dish of my own invention that Alison had seconds of and then polished off the leftovers for lunch the next day, so I guess she liked it) and splitting a bottle of wine and then a bottle of champagne and a nice bubble bath. The rest of the evening after the champagne glass incident involved us driving to the all-night drugstore for medical supplies, with me bleeding and crying and probably not in the best frame of mind to be driving at all in the first place.

Alison picked a bad time to accidentally cut my face. I was already self-conscious about the fact that I was still a little swollen and sore from my last marathon electrolysis session in Dallas two days before. I was still holding a lot of stress from the past few days and worries over my upcoming surgery. I was half drunk. And then there's the fear... and this brought it out again suddenly and in a big flood: that fear that here I'm already working pretty hard just to try to look feminine, and that at some point I won't be able to keep that up. It's vanity, I suppose, but it's hard not to be a little obsessed about your looks when they won't match your gender identity if you leave them up to nature. When you feel like you're working as hard as you can, and you're not making any headway at all, a minor setback can seem like a tragedy.

Anyway, I'm fine now. I felt silly even at the time bawling like a child over a fairly small cut, but in my weakened mental state, it was already distorting itself into a hideous scar. I knew I was overreacting, but I guess I also knew I just needed to let some things out, and so I did. Alison felt horrible about hurting me, and I felt horrible making her feel so guilty in turn. To her credit, though, she didn't get mad at me or tell me I was being stupid, which I was and I knew it. She just let me cry and then she put some ointment and a band-aid on my cut and then she held me and told me it would be okay.

In the end, I guess it was a pretty nice Valentine's Day.