God said, let there be a keychain in the rain.

For those of you out there wondering, yes, I am still alive. Two hands, feet, legs, all complete. I do the checklist when I get home every night.

Today I was biking under the rain (getting wet because I still don’t have a raincoat) to meet Ana for coffee, a friend of a friend who goes to Sciences Po. I get to Sciences Po, and realize that my keys are not in my bag. Since my landlord is out of town until the 5th, and I don’t feel like sleeping in the metro, I start to panic under the rain. When Ana met me at Sciences Po, I don’t think she met a decent human being. Imagine the way a cat gets when you get her wet- that was me. Unfortunately, my problem was not the rain but the keys.

So there were 3 possibilities:
1. I could have dropped them at the bike parking place after unlocking the bike
2. There was a bus, one of those huuuuuge touristy buses full of cameras and maps and very lost, jet-lagged people parked on Rue Blanche letting people off. Since this is a one-lane street, I rode on the sidewalk to get past it, and when I descended the sidewalk, I did it the brutal way. Obviously everything in my stomach (and therefore my bike’s basket as well) jumped, and the keys could have fallen out then.
3. The street that passes directly in front of the Louvre is really, really, really bumpy. I normally avoid it, but since it was raining, and the sidewalk is compact dirt, I didn’t want to get all muddy. They could have fallen out as my brain was trying not to be mixed with my intestines.

I couldn’t leave my bike just anywhere without tying it because it would get stolen, so Ana and I tried to take the metro. Except you cannot get on a metro, or on a bus (we asked) with a bike. I call that mechanical discrimination, and being afraid of the competition. So I part Ana in the I’m-a-wet-cat way and left the bike at a friend’s house not too far away from Sciences Po, where they have a bike parking lot. When I finally got out of the metro at Pigalle, it was already dark. Not knowing if I would find my keys and if I had a place to sleep that night, I was now in the stage of I-am-a-wet,-homeless-cat-and-I-want-to-cry.

I ran to the place where I park my bike, and there, sitting under the rain and a lot of mud, was my orange keychain with all of its door-opening properties. The baker right next to the parking saw what had just happened and came outside and told me- I saw the keys but decided to leave them there for the owner to find them. I was not longer a wet, homeless cat. Now I had my fiuf-face and he said, ‘you have a lot of luck’. Damn right, and now I also have a raincoat.