I promise there will be much better adventures in this category someday, but right now I am still shivering from my recent heart-stopping, spine-tingling encounters with [dramatic music here] Shopping Mall Escalators! Aiyyeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I love escalators. I hate escalators. They're fun, fast, and convenient. They catch clothing, and if your feet don't land on them just right, they have the power to cause both pain and suffering, including horrific amounts of embarrassment. The really big and fast ones make me kind of sick, too.
Normal people probably don't give escalators a second thought, whereas klutzy people like me who've already been betrayed by them (age eight, wearing a long dress and white platform shoes because it was the '70s in Miami, and a wedding was involved -- seriously scary, every part) tend to over-think escalators and freak out while doing so. This, among so many other attributes, has occasionally made me a pain in the butt for shopping companions in the past. I have always, since that fateful day in that long dress, hesitated at the brink, especially when not wearing the eyeglasses which grant me the power of depth perception. Now that I must negotiate escalators with a fake leg which includes a fake knee, and not the computerized kind with the automatic stabilizers, I'm a bigger pain than ever. I will walk right up to one, clearly displaying every intention of using it, and then balk like a horse at a fence. I just stop dead, forcing other people -- ordinary, graceful, coordinated people -- to pile into each other behind me.
Mostly I do this facing down. Up, like walking up steep hills, is actually rather easy unless I think the escalator in question is going too fast. Down, though, I'm sure I'll not just tumble down moving stairs in a public place with my butt in the air, gouging my eyes on those sharp metal stairs as I bounce, but my clothes will be caught in the process and ripped from my expansive flesh. I'm absolutely certain this will happen. I'm not certain right now, not sitting at my desk typing, far away from anything like a moving staircase or a public place, but every time I am one inch or less away from putting my foot onto a downward moving escalator, this is the image that flashes in my mind, panics, and freezes me.
My boyfriend is not always a patient gentleman, but he has been very good about this, while also insisting on supporting the assertions I myself have uttered (and only half-believed) in situ that I must get over my fear, and that practice is the only way, and that yes, today, tomorrow, someday will be the day I conquer it all. Saturday he had the opportunity to practice his patience and support.
We went to the shopping mall for dinner. There's a really great Indian place at our mall's food court, surprisingly enough, and we were very hungry and very, very tired having spent the entire day looking for a new place to live. The food court, though, is [more dramatic music] upstairs. Now, there are actual stairs, of course, but we were so tired and hungry we could barely breathe. And there is an elevator, too, naturally, but it is usually crammed with anxious young parents with strollers who jockey each other for position in the little glass car, often to the detriment of other people's shins, and frankly some of those babies need to be changed and don't make that tiny glass car smell very nice. The elevator is also quite far from the food court. (sigh) So...I decided to attempt the up escalator.
It's a wide one. I'd only been on two other escalators since my amputation, the really narrow one at Barnes & Noble which allows riders to grab onto both banisters at once while boarding (which is lovely and almost makes going down not entirely terrifying) and a very wide and seemingly quite fast one at a train station in the city, which I had balked at earlier in the day when it was running downward. I was able to get myself, after balking twice, to actually board the up-bound mall escalator by choosing the less popular of two different ones, by taking time to think about what I was doing, and by positioning myself with my weight solidly on my artificial leg before grabbing the banister next to my organic one, letting my organic leg move at the speed of the banister, and then placing it and launching myself onto it firmly in the center of a moving stair. It was only a little horrifying, and even ever so slightly exhilarating. (Extreme sports enthusiasts just don't know what they're missing.)
We sat. We ate. We decompressed after our exhausting day with still many, many more things to do and places to go. When we were ready, we had to figure out how to get back down. Again, stairs just seemed exhausting, and the elevator repulsive. So I told my true love that I wanted to at least try going down an escalator somewhere, 'cause, you know, I've got to get practice, can't go on being terrified all my life, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. I asked him which one he thought would be the least popular at that particular time, and he suggested using the one in Sears. (Between this and my initial girdle adventure, I'm starting to think Sears has far too important a place in my life.)
We went to Sears. No one was about. I started to try. Suddenly, everyone was there and wanted to go down the escalator, couples, families, employees...ugh, it was an unending stream. I was able to find time between other passengers to chicken out on my own, too, several times. My boyfriend watched me attempt to move forward. He suggested I try it using the banister on my amputated side, still placing my natural foot. This was even scarier, because in inching myself up to the edge of solidity, I put my fake foot on a slope, which meant that I ran the risk of launching myself onto the downward moving staircase from a position of falling, that is, from a stance where I had all my weight on a bent fake knee, which there was likely to cause me to fall on my face. On a downward moving metal staircase. In a public place. No.
Some people came up to the escalator and we told them, like all the others, to go ahead. I told them I had to figure something out; the woman said she thought we were just playing. I said it was rehab and that I was scared out of my wits. They looked alarmed as they sailed downward looking backward, halfway between smiling and not.
An employee came up to the escalator. She asked if we needed help. No, just space, we told her. "You know there's an elevator," she told me and offered to show me. "Yeah," I said, "and I'm just about to chicken out and go for it." My boyfriend looked disappointed, so I added, "But I'm just going to try one more time, if that's okay." "Sure," she said, sailing downward with a smile like all the others before her (all the others except those people I freaked out who didn't make eye contact when I eventually saw them again downstairs). I took a deep breath and tried again.
I realized at some point among all my false starts that part of the problem was that I was leaning too far forward. I wanted to see the whole stair, and the whole staircase, the relation of each to each while moving. If I wanted to actually board the escalator, I was going to have to knock that s**t off. Problem is, I can't knock that s**t off. I'm detail oriented, klutzy, and have poor depth perception. To move forward on faith and estimation is just not my way. We couldn't stay there all night, though.
I compromised with myself. I looked down, but tried to keep my body straight, kind of balanced back onto my hips the way I'd walked when I was a model, while still keeping half an eye on the moving stair I wanted to step onto. (I've put on a couple of cup sizes, though, so that's easier said than done!) I finally forced myself forward. Gripping the too-fast-moving banister on my sound side, I finally just let myself put a foot on an equally too-fast-moving stair and commit to it. My breath stopped. My heart stopped. Then the blood roared in my ears and I had a whopping headache, but my boyfriend was congratulating me joyously as we, too, finally, sailed downstairs. "You nailed it!" he told me. "Right in the middle! Good job!"
In a way, it's kind of embarrassing to have to accept congratulations for such ridiculously trivial accomplishments. On the other hand, when I can manage it, it's so much better to accomplish even the most trivial thing than to cave in to fear of failing at it.
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