My Most Embarrassing Moment

Toilet paper and yellow carparks

Well, my second most embarrassing moment.

The most embarrassing, I would say, was when I was eighteen years old at the pub, reasonably drunk. I returned from the bathroom to witness a large group of male onlookers point at me and laugh. My friend laughed too — so hard that she was crying. As we stood in the middle of the pub with the hyenas circling, I couldn’t make her explain what was wrong with me. When she regained her composure she pointed to the two-metre long trail of toilet paper behind me that was tucked into my pants like a tail.

The second most embarrassing went like this:

I was at a large shopping complex and parked in the yellow section of the colour-coded carpark. Being from the country, where we only had ground-level parking, I was careful to memorise it. Yellow carpark, yellow carpark, yellow carpark. After looking through a dozen clothing stores I remembered how much I hate shopping, and decided that no clothes anywhere in the world suited me. I walked out to the carpark, the yellow carpark, to return to my vehicle. It wasn’t where I thought it should be. For the next ninety minutes, I walked up and down every damn row of that yellow carpark several times. Blistered and angry, I returned to the shopping complex and bought a bread roll and sat on a bench to eat it. I brushed the crumbs off my pants, then stood up wondering what else I could possibly do. And that’s when I saw her.

She was a quite a distance away, but her face stood out in a sea of faces. I couldn’t remember her name, but I knew that I knew her, and that I liked her, and if I told her my story I knew she would help me. I put my head down and walked briskly in her direction and – BAM.

Straight into a mirrored wall.

I don’t know if people pointed and laughed, like the men at the pub, because I got out of there so quickly. But I imagine what they saw was similar to a bird that flies into a windscreen. What a fucking nob. Heart pounding, I ran outside and phoned my city friend who lived half an hour away. “I went shopping, and I think my car’s been stolen,” I explained. We drove around and around, eventually discovering there were two yellow carparks (Why? To torment country people who get so frazzled they smack into mirrors?).

Embarrassment aside, how lovely to recognise myself as a friend.