LIGHT TRAFFIC

Thinking about it, there’s nothing so surprising about the fact I fractured my kneecap running into a wall. Honestly. In one form or another, I’ve been rushing headlong into walls my whole life. It just so happened that this time around, it was a real wall. The tangible kind. The kind that doesn’t so much break your heart or fill you with doubt but bona fide cracks your bones. How about that for a change.

The first thing my friend Sean said, when he heard, was he was proud of me. “At least you went down the Carolyne way,” he said on Facebook chat, punctuating his statement with a yellow smiley-face thing. I think he’s the only person who really got it. Except perhaps my dad, who said “that’s my daughter!”, and reminded me, once more, of the title he’s come  up with for my mémoire: Carolyne Weldon: The Path of Greatest Resistance. (I’m not writing a mémoire, it’s happening in his head.)

Running into a wall and breaking a knee is just the latest chapter in the Carolyne Weldon vs. the physical world saga. (You can draw your own conclusion about who’s been winning so far.) As far back as I remember – ages before I was old enough to start crashing cars – negotiating floors, walls, stairs and other large immobile objects was always a challenge. In New-Age speak, it’s called “not being very grounded.” That’s an understatement.

The real world, full of sharp corners, ditches, concrete slabs and slippery surfaces, was always more threatening to me than the orderly realm of ideas and words. Oh words. My mother says I could conjugate verbs before I was done breastfeeding. Prennes!, I would tell her imploringly, arms outstretched, not long after my first birthday. “I would like you to pick me up”, I’d say in French, conditional tense. Years later, as a young 20-something in Istanbul, I picked up Turkish in a matter of months. Street Turkish too – no teacher, no book.

The scars on my knees, however, that busy network of intersecting bump and cuts, some pinched and raised, the size of fat slugs, tell of a different side to the story. They are the tactile proof and reminder I couldn’t walk without falling on my face – to save my life – before the age of 4.

I remember sitting outside of our house, in a tiny lawn chair. It was foldable and navy, with a yellow and white lion pattern. I must be 3 or something, and I’m crying, bawling my eyes out because I toppled over in the gravel driveway – AGAIN – and both my knees are scraped and bleeding. My father’s disinfecting the mess (little stones encased in flesh, always a good time), and putting band-aids on (fabric Elastoplast, the hippie kind). He’s telling me that I’m okay, and stop crying Carolyne. And I’m telling him I really want to but I can’t. “I can’t stop crying Dad. I can’t”. Hot tears of shame, knees mangled, sitting in the sun.

Riding that wave, my uncle Steve was the first man to ever break my heart.
“I hope you realize you’ll never be a model,” he used to tell me.

“HAVE YOU SEEN YOUR KNEES.”

I was 6 or 7 at the time, way into Vogue (my cousin Andrée and I were really into animal prints, it was the 80s), and absolutely crushed. He was right, I thought to myself. So obvious. My knees were a mess. You really couldn’t be a model, with knees like mine, could you. “Shame,” Steve would say, under his blonde mustache, “because it looks like you’ll be tall, too.”

I don’t know who’s flash of genius it was, but I somehow ended up in ballet school. Classical ballet. I mainly remember mirrors (can’t lie, always been a big fan of mirrors), and getting my hair braided and once a concert where we were little red birds and I thought the costume was terrific. Well I never learned how to do any of those ballet things properly (pointes? moving gracefully? I don’t know what ballerinas do), but I finally mastering the fine and complex art of WALKING. Putting one damn foot ahead of the other. Rinse. Repeat. Without your knees ever coming in contact with the ground. Hallelujah.

And now it looks like I’m about to have to do some more learning how to walk. I’ve been in a full-leg splint for 5 weeks now, waiting for my knee fracture to heal. The weirdest fringe of my group of friends have been saying that the orthopedic-coloured, velcroed-out casing hugging my right leg from thigh to ankle is a hot look for me. In some twisted David Cronenberg way. All I know is a) I haven’t been able to bend my knee for 5 weeks, b) I couldn’t run the half-marathon I was training for,  and c) never, ever take putting socks and underwear on for granted.

But soon, real soon, when they take this thing off me and send me home, free at last, a young woman moving about with the stiffest non-intentional rapper limp and the tentativeness of a newborn foal, I’ll walk slow – real slow – smile to heaven and watch my feet.

Life in the slow lane. Might be my best look yet.