There was no doubt it was going to happen, but I was still surprised when it did.

            A couple of weeks ago, I moved into my latest residence, a brand-new house purchased by my roommate and her husband. There was never any doubt that I was going to be tagging along with them when they moved into the house. I am a barnacle, and the only way to get a barnacle off your hull is with a high-pressure hose. Fortunately for me, "high-pressure hose" was not one of the wedding gifts on their registry.

            The house is probably the nicest place I've ever lived, due in no small part to the fact that everything in it is brand-new. It's got that "new house" smell, or at least it did until we went two weeks without trash service and it started to have more of that "new landfill" smell. Not that I am complaining. I'm lucky to have ANYWHERE to live. Were it not for the roommate dragging me along with her, like a special needs crack baby, I'd probably be living at the Y, getting in knife fights with people because they keep un-alphabetizing my DVD collection.

            As much as I'm enjoying my new living quarters, it comes with a downside that has taken some serious adjustments on my part. You see, the house has three stories, and my room happens to be up on the third floor. In my entire life, I've never lived anywhere with stairs, so suddenly having to trudge down two flights of them every time I want a fork has not been easy to deal with.

            It was the worst when we moved in, because when I was packing, I had no concept of what it meant to carry heavy things up a bunch of stairs, so I was just filling up boxes with as much as I could fit in them. I had several giant boxes of books that weighed roughly as much as a baby elephant. Boxes that I was having trouble just picking up off the ground and walking out to my car. And because I have the reasoning ability of a tree stump, it did not occur to me that this was going to be a problem until I stood on the first floor, at the base of the stairs, struggling to remain upright while grasping a box containing a metric ton of books and DVD's. "Hmmm…" I thought to myself. "I wonder how this is going to work." It turns out the way that it works is that you put one foot in front of the other and sweat and grunt and gasp for air and think terrible hateful thoughts about the jackass who packed these boxes and how as soon as you can stand up under your own power again, you are going to wring his skinny little pencil neck. (It was pointed out to me later on that a better solution would have been to just take some of the items out of the boxes before taking them upstairs. It was a brilliant idea and allowed me to not only feel exhausted, but also stupid. Thanks!)

            Eventually, I got everything upstairs and proceeded to start unpacking and getting settled in. But a nagging thought started burrowing into my head and the more I thought about it, the more I knew it was something that was very likely to happen. More than very likely, in fact. A near certainty. I started putting two and two together and came up with the following equation: (I am extremely clumsy + I am not used to stairs = Danger) It all added up, and I knew that before too long, my equation would be proven. And today it finally was.

            For you see, today I fell down the stairs.

            It came as a huge surprise to me, because when it happened, I was still half-asleep. I'd just rolled out of bed and was stumbling downstairs to use the bathroom. About three steps down, instead of placing my foot on the middle of the stair ("Recommended"), my leg swung several inches too far forward and I ended up putting the heel of my foot on the very edge of the stair ("Not Recommended. Parental Advisory Suggested"). As soon as I put my weight on it, my heel slipped forward, off the stair into thin air and my leg shot up like I was auditioning to be in the Rockettes. My upper body kind of bucked in reverse and my arm shot out to grab the handrail, although by then, it was too late. The leg I was standing on buckled and I crashed backwards, landing on my back at this diagonal angle that absolutely cannot be ergonomically correct. I sort of bounced once, and then my momentum caused me to slide down the last few stairs, until I finally came to a stop in a heap of flailing limbs.

            The very first thing I did, before it had even fully registered in my brain what had occurred, was to leap to my feet and look around to make sure nobody had seen my little spill. On my list of mental priorities, "pain" and "common sense" are way behind "saving face". If there HAD been somebody standing there (and I would've known right away if someone was, because they would've been laughing so hard they probably would've had a heart attack. One true fact in life is that it is hysterical to watch tall, skinny people fall down), I would have loudly stated, "I am fine! There is no problem here! I meant to do that! It didn't even hurt!" I would have said these things even if there were broken ribs protruding from my chest. And then I would have limped down the hall and locked myself in the bathroom for about a week. But as luck would have it, nobody was home, so I didn't have to hide my true feelings any longer. My true feeling was "ouch".

            So now that I've finally fallen down the stairs, I've spent the rest of the day wondering if that was the one time and I don't have to worry about it anymore, or if today's little spill was a sign of things to come. Sure, it's always a possibility when you live in a house with stairs that you might slip once in a while, but once you go crashing down the steps like I did, isn't it logical to assume that you've learned your lesson and that you will be just a little more careful when navigating the treacherous terrain of the suburban household?

            … I think I'm going to start looking into the rates at the Y.