A Merry Christmas Face Plant

I’ve been limping since Christmas day.

A little backstory: As most of you know, my family is multicultural af. My husband is from Italy, my dad is from Iran, and that’s not even counting my grandparents who came from Wales, Ireland, New Zealand and the Netherlands. In that sense, I’m as American as it gets: A big fat melting pot of things. What does this have to do with my knee? I’ll explain.

On every holiday or weekend day, my husband Skypes his parents, sister, and our nieces. We also call our friends in Italy and Spain and sometimes my cousins in London. Also, my dad busts out his Facetime and calls every relative we have in Iran. Every. Single. One. On a day like Christmas, my family can easily spend HOURS staring at iPhone screen. I love talking with our friends and family, it’s like my favorite part of the holidays, but sometimes you need a break to eat or pee or just to let your eyes go back to normal or think of new things to say because there are only so many interesting things you can talk about after 4 hours.

My dad handed me his phone no less than 64 times by 11:00 a.m. on Christmas and after an hour of saying, “Hello! Merry Christmas! How are you? I’m great! You’re beautiful! I love you!” in Persian (because I only know about 100 words and the older I get the more I lose), I needed a break. So, I casually strolled up to my little brother, shoved the phone into his hand with my cousin on the screen, and sprinted away. He shook his fist at me but I was gone, gone, gone.

I peed, I had a snack, and I settled onto the couch to play with my parent’s dog. No less than 5 minutes later, I notice that my little brother was slowly making his way towards me. He was closing in and I panicked. I knew what he was doing. So I tried to nonchalantly do a little stand-squat thing so I could bend over the back of the couch to escape. My plan was to simply sit on the back of the couch so I could flip my legs around and hop down. I’d done it 1000 times in the past while wrestling with my younger siblings and fleeing from them. But it seems that as I’ve grown older, I am no longer a stealthy ninja, but instead a clumsy and uncoordinated lump of shit. Instead of  making a clean getaway, I sat on the back of the couch (which is a solid 4 feet high at least) and then FELL off sideways, belly flopping from the back of the couch onto the marble floor. The entire family screamed, “OMG!” And as I lay on my back laughing but also stifling a scream from the pain (I’d hit both of my knee caps HARD), my family peaked over the back of the couch at me with “did you die” expressions on their faces. Then, my little brother’s face popped into view from above my head. He shoved the iPhone into my face, and my aunt who I am obsessed with was all smiling at me, and I was forced to take the phone and try to explain in broken Persian why I was laying on the floor, all red-faced, and mangled. I heard my brother whisper, “look alive, sis,” as he made a run for it.

My knees are black and blue and I learned a valuable lesson: Next time I fall off of the couch while trying to evade my brother, play dead. Just fucking play dead. Also? Revenge.