Slippery Slope

Mondays are a pretty magical day in the life of Mariel Murray. At 8 or 9am I get up, go to breakfast, go to class, go to lunch, go to dance, go to another class that ends at 5pm, and then pass out,. Transitioning between these events involves a lot of zooming across the land on my part.

Today, however, there was a slight interruption in my frantic running.

This morning I was filled with an overwhelming desire to reminisce, to go back to the days of my horseback riding. My boots were buried under a mountain of shoes, and I mined them out this morning. They functioned exceptionally in the stirrup, but once I took them out of their element they had a tendency to not perform so well. And apparently I was asking too much when I had hoped they would grip the ground a little bit.

After I devoured my stir-fry, I went back to my dorm to get some cloths for dance. I walked by the office of my Resident Director, Alexandra, and was disappointed when I looked into her office and she wasn't there to look back at me. I still kept looking into the office to gaze back at my reflection, and as I typically tell myself, not out of vanity, out of habit. Dancers tend to look into reflective surfaces whenever we do anything, since we've became accustomed to watching ourselves. Or maybe we're all vain and full or it. But regardless of my reasoning behind my obsession with myself, I still stared, and forgot to look as to where I was going.

In result, I started to walk down the stairs, and it wasn't an absolute necessity to look as to where I was going, as I had walked down those stairs hundreds of times. So, I didn't see the sand. My boots, which had no desire to do their job off the stirrup, landed right on the sand. Walking on the concrete outside, covered in a layer of a sandy-icy mixture, was bad enough, but the sand on the staircase was somehow worse, especially when I was too busy staring back at myself to notice it. My shoe hit the floor and didn't stop as I picked up my other foot, so my entire body was in the air for several seconds until I landed directly on my hindquarters and slid down the half-flight of stairs, wetting my pants in the process.

My luck took a turn for the better as I picked myself up, my pride still on the ground, and looked around the corridor. Not a soul was there to witness it. I thank the lord for that.