Lessons From Lacerating My Labia

My biggest takeaway? Never straddle anything ever again

Photo by Ava Sol, Unsplash.

The Fall.

It was a Thursday. Early morning. My partner Adrian had already left the house for his morning workout with his fitness trainer. The only kind of early morning exercise I’ll do is sprint out of the house if it’s burning down.

I padded down the stairs. Stretched across the bottom step is a long, narrow piece of plywood, a make-shift barricade to bar our adorable, asshole dog from sneaking into bedrooms to shred whatever’s in the trash bin or eat Adrian’s earplugs.

I straddled the barricade to step over it, but my pajama bottom caught on the top of it. It threw me off balance, causing my foot to slip off the stair, and land on the floor. My crotch and my entire body weight smacked the top of the barricade.

Sucking a belly full of air through my teeth, my hands instantly went between my legs and the profanity started: holy shit, shit, shit, shiiiiiiiiit. It burned.

Strangely, the burning dulled after about a minute and I thought it was over. And then I experienced the same sensation I had when my water broke just before labor. I looked down and my once-light-gray pajamas had turned the color of a Cabernet Sauvignon. Oh fuck.