I Am A Klutz

Last night I was walking idly around my apartment chatting on the phone and I looked down and noticed that my toe was bleeding. Kind of a lot.

I have no idea how that happened.

It did not startle me, particularly, because I am not a graceful person and am used to banging into things. When I was a child I would come back from every excursion dirtier than the children around me. Today there are relatively few occasions for getting covered in dirt, but I pick up stray bruises. I bump my head on things. I bang my elbow against walls. I trip, a little bit, walking down the street.

I am self-conscious about it. The ability to move smoothly through space seems like a desirable human attribute.
On the other hand, if it really mattered to me I could probably fix it. Be one of those people who takes up fencing or ballet late in life. Only some of my clumsiness is innate. Enough to keep me out of contention in competitive sporting events, but probably not enough to make me fall on my face.

The rest is lack of attention. I don't think about those things. I think about things that I'm good at, like smoking or sleeping. And lost in that haze, I knock over my coffee cup, and curse.


In some ways I wish it weren't fixable, that I could say, "well, I'm left-handed," or "I lacked proper training as a child." There seems something strange about deciding that I admire gracefulness in other people, think it a good thing in the abstract, but refuse, in the particular, to take the steps needed for me to obtain it.