A Fish out of Water

I guess you want to know all the details of this latest mishap. I assure you, it wasn’t done willingly; doziness played a small part, but it’s mostly Giuseppe Verdi’s fault.

After playing Flick the Light Switch and getting into bed, I close my eyes and prepare to slip into uninterrupted slumber, cocooned in the hard-won darkness of my roomy suite. 

Forty-five minutes later, Morpheus still hasn’t visited, not even made an appointment. It’s not that the bed isn’t comfortable, far from it. Queen-sized and supplied with enough pillows to build a replica of the Qait Bey fortress, it’s more than adequate for sound sleep. Neither is there too much noise. The entire deck is as quiet as could be. My brain just plain refuses to switch to idle.

Maybe I should read; that usually works to induce a respectable degree of somnolence. On second thought, I reject the idea. That would involve using electrical illumination and lead to a repeat of the dance-of-the-lights, and I’m not up to doing this again tonight. Besides, I made a vow. I need to find something to do in the dark. 

I start humming. I hum the entire Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Verdi’s opera, Nabucco. Twice. Not quite lullaby territory, but a mellow tune just the same. And effective. Mistress Narcosis is hailing me and I eagerly get in her chariot. Dreamland is just around the corner.

I jump out of the chariot. My lips are dry. I find it impossible to sleep with dry lips. By a stroke of luck, I’ve got some lip balm in my suitcase, and the required piece of luggage just happens to be right next to the bed. With the lights still off (ain’t no way they’re coming on), and with my eyes also closed (don’t want to undo all of Nabucco’s good work), I reach a hand to the suitcase, unzip the front pocket, and rifle through it, using my highly developed tactile skills. My fingers find the small makeup pouch, unzip it, root around its inside, and locate the tube of lip balm, easily recognizable by its telltale shape.

That was a piece of cake! I uncap the tube and apply a generous layer over my parched lips. Then, as women always do with lip products, I rub my lips together to better smear the balm into every little dry spot. 

Recapping the tube, I smile, aiming for a full-toothed grin to punctuate my successful in-the-dark-lip-balming. My lips stay together, the toothy grin not happening. I open my mouth wider. Then, slowly, very slowly, my lips agree to part, peeling off each other like reluctant Band-Aids off a scraped knee. What in the world? Why are my lips so sticky?

Astronomical crap! In the next nanosecond, neurons fire commands at every muscle in my body with the impetus of an atomic blast. Mouth is agape, eyes are wide-open, body is off the bed and shooting toward the bathroom with a hop that would put a kangaroo to shame, hand still grasping the cause of all this tumult: my travel-sized glue stick. If I don’t want to be reduced to emitting mmm mmmm sounds exclusively, I must get this stuff off before it sets. 

In the washroom, I grab tissues and try to rub off the aberrant substance. This only results in gluing shredded bits of tissue to my lips, making me look like I indulged in a box of Kleenex for a midnight snack. Water and soap are next. The tissue detritus is removed and the gluey tackiness slowly disappears, but not before I get a mouthful of soap. 

Before my taste buds can mount a full-scale revolt, I frantically brush my tongue with a kilo of toothpaste, thinning the paste with added water—bad idea—and generating masses of bubbles in return. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror and see a creature that is far from human. Hair all mussed up, eyes wild and  teary, nose running, mouth foaming and drooling green paste, I could scare the ugliest demons straight back to Hades. 

After the chaos, with my oral mucosa still anaesthetized from copious swishes of mouthwash and the cabin fully lit (can’t remember doing that), I sit on the bed and survey the scene of the crime. The opened pouch is not the makeup pouch containing the real, the genuine, the legitimate lip balm. It’s another pouch of similar size, into which I’d crammed the glue stick, eyeglass cleaner, pens and pencils, hand sanitizer, spot remover, and other sundries. 

What happened finally makes sense. I grabbed the wrong pouch and my drowsy brain (Verdi’s doing), believing it was the makeup pouch, misidentified every item my fingers probed. The HB pencil became, in my mind, an eyebrow pencil, the spot remover became mascara, and the small bottle of hand sanitizer, foundation. When my hand caught up with the glue stick, the mental leap to lip balm was but a mere twitch. 

Nevertheless, all this does not answer the question: What was I thinking to have packed a glue stick? Really! Was I planning to affix a prosthetic nose on the Sphinx with it? Restore ancient papyri? Reassemble a few discombobulated mummies? My questions remain unanswered as I trudge about the cabin, restoring darkness, and getting myself back to bed. 

Every now and then, I feel compelled to open and close my mouth repeatedly, like a fish out of water. I do this to reassure myself that my lips haven’t spontaneously bonded together due to a smidgen of glue having survived the removal process and achieved industrial strength by some crazy chemical reaction with the mouthwash. So, for the rest of the night, I get virtually no sleep. Besides, with my bedraggled looks, Mistress Narcosis probably doesn’t want me anywhere near her wagon.

The light switch vow having already been broken, I take the opportunity—since I’m wide awake, simulating trout—to formulate a new one. From this time forward, I vow never to utter the words “my lips are sealed” in response to a request for secrecy. And it goes without saying, my tour mates shall not hear of this little exploit.