Not covered by warranty.

I am turning 30 in 6 days. As a result, the slow breakdown has begun, culminating in physical combustion the day after my birthday, a.k.a. the day after the warranty runs out. Right this very moment, I am sitting at my computer, with a heart shaped hot water bottle strapped to my neck and back with a light teal pashmina (the latest in self-remedy accessories), and a hot water-soaked clean tea-towel is crammed against my left eye, behind my glasses which sit akimbo, allowing me to see the screen with the fading vision of my right eye. My glasses perscription is too weak to correct my malformed eyes, recently described as “barely light recievers” after a friend tried on my pop-bottle prescription, instantly yanking them away and doing the cross-eyed, sinus pinching, puff and blow routine accompanied with trying on the glasses of the very impaired.

How did I come to be in such a state? I woke up that way. What did I do?  I slept. Yesterday morning, after a hearty night of ill-positioned sleep, I awake with a searing neck/back pain, radiating into my left arm, preventing me from turning my head to the left. I am no long and ambi-turner. I booked in for a cheap massage at a massage school and met with the most charming student MT I have had the fortune to meet. Her gentle voice so kindly asked after my health and prodded my tender, oh so tender neck and shoulder. She said, “I feel so bad for you,” in this sincerely compassionate tone. “I feel so bad for all my clients. All you were trying to do was sleep for goodness sakes!” How could I not be touched by that?  After a painful and relieving treatment, she gave me even more cute expressions for the road, “Remember, heat is your friend. Do the stretches I showed you as often as you can. I will pray for you”. Ok. Usually that would be a huge creep out for me, but she had been so kind and compassionate, her prayer was clearly a clean gift. Then she said, “I don’t know what you believe, but you just send it out to the universe, ok?”. Ok, you cute 25 year old nurturing massage therapy student. I will send it out to the universe.

Side note: A house across the street from me that I view each day from my window is, I think, a squatter’s den. It has at this moment 3 failed parcel delivery notices on the window, and at least 4 paper notices of a more official appearance on the front door. There is mail sticking out of the mailbox, and the visible windows are filled with mashed and broken venetian blinds. Essentially, it’s a babe-lair and anyone who wants to move to Toronto could move in NOW! End side note.

Did I mention that blinking had become painful?  Today, this led me on a trip to a walk-in clinic that left my eye bright yellow with potentially disease-revealing dye. I learned that warm compresses were needed to allow the thing in my eyelid (a benign cyst essentially, but with some weird name I can’t recall) to let go of it’s weird juices. I could also use some kind of “lid-brush” (the people at the pharmacy raised a curious eyebrow when asked where these were found, the answer being Nowhere) to massage the eyelid, which would encourage the same result.  So I am steaming my face and administering a firm but sensual massage to bring my eye boil to “full release”. Professional and discreet, it’s the gentleman’s choice.

Trudging toward the home-bound subway I was feeling like a real hobo, with my droopy swollen eyelid, my thick-but-not-thick-enough glasses, my still very painful neck and my beaten down attitude… It was then that the subway (you remember our relationship, of course), really rose to the occasion, and pulled out all the stops to make me feel better.

I stepped onto the platform to find my subway pulling up – I didn’t even break stride as I hopped, lightfooted once more, through the sliding doors. My heart started to sink when I saw the throngs of the homeward rush hour. I was annoyed when I found myself crammed between jostling huffers, huffing and jostling annoyedly at my backpackin’ presence. I was further annoyed when I saw over three shoulders and a tiny asian head an EMPTY SEAT! Miracle of rush hour miracles, and here I was 4 bodies away and WHY oh WHY was no one sitting down and giving my backpack and I a little breathing room?  A stop comes up, more jostling, some leaving(!) and I am clear to Find That Seat. I begin to bound when I see a sight. A sight I see. The sight I see is a transmogrification. What was once an empty seat between two people on a bench is now a space to “give this guy some room”. This Guy is a kid, maybe 16 or 17, hunkered over his knees, but head oddly up, skin oddly green. Oddly, he is holding a pile of odd napkins or paper towels of some kind. I notice something wet on his shirt. And something chunky on his shoes.  I am thinking “this kid just puked”. Mercifully, that acrid bile smell associated with another man’s offal is not strong or really even specifically detectable. The same way you can pick up on subtle tastes of chocolate and berry in wine only after you have been told they are there, it was only after I saw his chunky shoes that I could sniff his former stomach content’s bouquet; a sour top note on the transit musk. I was just warming up to the spectacle (and looming potential threat) of this teen’s indigestion, when another stop came and more people were removed. My position switched next to an aged black man. I had taken the spot of a younger black man who exited the train waving to the elder. After the doors shut the elder said in the most friendly grandpa voice imaginable, “What a fucking moron”.

I looked up at him surprised. Usually if people talk on public transit, they are nuts and eye contact is best avoided (we’ve gone over this I am sure). But this was so out of the blue and did NOT have that tone of crazy you hear so often. I raised an eyebrow to say, “Oh, really? Do go on” and in his aged wisdom he was able to read my signs and went on (imagine the voice of the white haired grandpa on the Cobsy show saying this. The voice was identical), “That stupid sonofabitch. What can I say? He’s been smokin’ pot every day for 25 years. What a waste of time is that?  Can’t he find anything better to do with his time? Isn’t that a waste of time?”  I agreed it was. He went on.  “What else do you call someone who smokes WEED all the time for 10 years, 15 years. What kind of fucking moron talks to a stranger on the subway and talks about WEED?” I agreed this was foolish. He fulfilled my Children’s Wish Foundation wish and went on, “I mean REALLY? What kind of fucking moron IS this guy. Waste of a life, I tell you.”

He was interrupted here by some severe lurching of the subway and some commotion in the area of our little green friend. An older female germiphobe was offering him Wet Ones from a ziploc extracted from her purse and offering advice and platitudes such as, “there’s a little something on your pants, son. There, you’ve got it. You’re just FINE” while the youth was green, thoroughly ill and looking into nowhere while absently rubbing the cloths on his pants. He was armed with not only two soiled handfuls of paper towel, but the remaining 1/4 of a bottle of coke. Upset stomach? What could be more soothing? That Taiwanese toilet bowl cleaner, Coca Cola ™! Pour some into your vomit-riddled stomach today!

And like that, we were at my stop. I waved a hearty goodbye to the small black man who waved heartily back, and I cast a farewell glance at the vomit stained man, and saw that the Subway, knowing how rumpled and bedraggled I had been feeling, opened it’s doors to show me the horror and humour of others, encouraging me to take heart. Sure I had a droopy eye and a painful back, but Heat is my friend, and so are warm compresses and so is the Subway.