I opened one eye to the sun slanting through the uncovered Chilean window. And then realized only one eye was open. I recounted my previous evening´s activities and realized, no, this was not a UDI (Unidentified Drinking Injury). I hadn´t consumed alcohol in over twenty-four hours. Yet my eye would not open.
This was more curious than the time I awoke on the living room couch and removed the blanket to find one of my friends draped across my legs. At least that time my last memory of the night before involved Tequila. Tequila and I are not friends.
I removed my hand from the bed's balmy insulation and attempted to open my eyelid. My sole accomplishment: dislocating four eyelashes. I abandoned attempts to pry my eye open and envisaged the Southeast Asian excursions ten months prior.
During the extravaganza that was last summer, my body hated me. Justifiably. I saturated it with Thai Whiskey and rum buckets at every opportunity and spent twelve too many mornings feeling like an elephant had trampled me the night before.
That trip I also managed to slice my foot open in the Mekong River. Consequence: infection. And a doctor-order to not insert my foot in water. We were on an island.
The foot fatality, however, was a consummation of rum buckets and bad decisions.
This South American journey, my body doesn´t hate me. My body hates South America. At the ridiculously high altitude that is Lake Titicaca, the sun demolished my skin like Donatella Versache annihilated any semblance of normal human being. The consensus: my skin was diseased. With skin cancer. A week later, my back was referred to as a map, due to the massive color alterations on my skin. I looked like a diseased toad.
Then, too, the sun attacked my bottom lip like David attacked Goliath. The sun won. My lip blistered. It also enlarged to seventeen times its normal size. While it did resemble Angelina Jolie´s in size, the twin blisters (named King and Kong) made me about as attractve as the mom in What´s Eating Gilbert Grape. With that thought, I closed my one eye and retreated to sleep.
Two hours later I one-eye dragged myself to the bathroom and viewed my left eye. It was a red and pussing volcanoe. I forced my eye open with my fingers, thoughtfully sanitized by Chilean tap water. It was half the size of my right eye and completely bloodshot. Just the one. I couldn´t help but think that if the other was identical, at least I would appear massively high off the Ganja. But no. I appeared to have taken a shot of steriods directly in to my eye.
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