My Biggest Bruise

To introduce this topic I am going to bring up the fact that I am clumsy. Some of my many past injuries include tripping in the shower while shaving my leg and taking an ice cream scoop of skin off in the process. Another is when I sneezed while putting black eyeliner on the waterline of my eyelid and giving my eyeball a big enough poke to leave a red dot on the white of my eye for a few days. There's a reason a body can heal and it's because someone like me would look a real mess if all of my old bumps and bruises were forever visible. This brings me to the story of my biggest bruise and the lesson I learned from it. Please enjoy, although I highly advise that you do not try to recreate it as I can assure you that it hurt badly enough to regret it.

I got the humongous bruise simply enough. I was at the gym and the rule there was that if you left your locker unlocked all of your things would be put into the main office until you came to claim it. The problem with this was that I only had a towel the size of a hand towel and the main office was at the front of the gym by the entrance. Being that it was the weekend and later in the day, I thought I could sneak in and out quickly enough to not have to worry about anyone bothering my things. Naturally, when from the corner of my eye I noticed the nighttime cleaning crew rummaging around my locker, I realized that my plan was flawed. In a flash, I went running out of the shower in nothing but my soapy shower shoes and my tiny towel. I had made it to the row that my locker was in when I slipped and flew up into the air with enough distance to have a chance to look down and think "This is going to hurt." Then I slammed butt first on the concrete floor feeling like gravity itself had punched me into the ground. I screamed in pain but could walk around, although slowly which indicated to me that nothing was broken at the time and I went home quietly.

That night it felt like no position was comfortable to sleep in because it all hurt my tenderized tush. The next day I had a bruise the size of a baking sheet on my rear end that extended to my right thigh. My boyfriend at the time laughed off my accident-prone ways as usual. Most people who know me well also know that things like this are common for me. He took out his disposable camera from our weekend trip to the beach that we had gone on the weekend before and used the last of the film's roll with a picture of my bruise thinking it would be a funny story to tell later. At the pharmacy we took the camera to develop all of the pictures but kept that one. I was angry because I had worn a bathing suit bottom in the picture, but they refused to relinquish the photo anyway. To this day I do not have the image of my massively bruised body.

The complaint that I had for the pharmacy was that they kept the image of my own body from me. Now I could have saved it from my phone, but at the time that this happened cell phone cameras were not common. I have never had a bruise that big after. Not to invoke fate to reinjury me or anything like that, but it was a memory of mine that it was decided that I could not have. The pharmacy kept the negative too, so I could not go to another place and get the image developed there. This was a typical practice for photo centers to do up until recently. People may say that Instagram or other social media sites have become too sexualized, but consenting adults do have a right to their bodies and what they deem images of them to be taken for. I want my bruise picture, not because it had any sexual meaning at all, but to remember the time that I was airborne for a few moments and landed like a jackass in a locker room. That was my right. I own my own body and should have autonomy over its images, and so should any other consenting adult. Agree or disagree with the Conspiracy Meow! site forums and as always, Let Your Inner Shut In Totally Wig Out!