Reverb #3!

December 3 – Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

I'm not really sure what is says about my year when the moment I felt most alive is when I thought I was dying. Hopefully that it was so busy that I forgot to stop and think about it. There were a lot of moments that I felt alive: stepping outside into the snow and super brisk air, getting engaged, banging my funny bone, laughing so hard I cried in a cabin in North Carolina with my family. Those are good, wonderful, amazing experiences, but the one moment that sticks out in my mind happened in Paris on our honeymoon.

We ate a lot of food in Paris- copious amounts of nutella crepes and baguette sandwiches and whatever else struck our fancy. And that was just on the first day. Then came the second day, and we ate a lot of the same things, why fix something if it's not broken, right? But the second night, something happened. We made it a point to see the Eiffle Tower lights sparkle at 10 PM every night we were there. It was SO pretty and the apartment we were staying in was a quick 10 minute walk, so it was convenient. While we were sitting there, in our lovely newlyweds-in-Paris bliss, I started feeling a little weird. A little tummy discomfort and a little back pain. Watched the lights, went home, went to bed.

At 12:30 AM I woke up in the most agonizing pain I've ever been in my life at that point. Went into the bathroom, threw up, and curled up on the pink tile in our apartment's bathroom floor. The pain subsided, and I went to bed with AC being none the wiser. Til it happened at 1:30AM. At that point, I was genuinely scared. I don't get sick. So I woke AC up with the words “Something's wrong”... don't do that, it scares the other person. Back to the bathroom floor I went, the tile cooling my middle back, where are the pain was. AC flipping through the travel book trying to find a translation service for 911. AC doesn't speak a lick of french. I did a pretty good job of getting us around and what we needed (6 years and a high score on the National French Exam, FTW) but I was not exactly in the position to tell them where to spend the ambulace. Thankfully, it went and stayed away for the rest of the night. It happened the night after that, and the night after that, so three nights total. But that pain... oh geeze, the pain made me feel more alive than I have ever before. It happens every now and again, mostly when I'm not eating right and not drinking water but I don't think it's much cause for concern. Hopefully. It happens so infrequently that it can't be an allergy, because I eat pretty much the same things all the time. It does flare up when there's a lot of grease, though.

But it hurts so bad.

Sorry for the abrupt cut-off, but I'm beyond exahausted.