Augh! My eye!
I just felt a thing in my eye, so I looked at it in a mirror and saw...an eyelash.
A tiny little black line, finer than a thread, swimming around on my eyeball. I would blink, and it would move to another part of my eye--on the white, on the iris, wheeeee!
I have to get this out of there, I thought. It will make me crazy until I do.
Attempt one: Touch with finger, directly on eyeball. AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! How do you people with contacts do that? Ack ack ack squick ack ack!
Also, this totally failed to do anything with the eyelash other than move it to a more annoying location on my eyeball.
Attempt 2: Rub eye. Feel eyelash wandering around on eyeball. Wonder if this is going to scratch my cornea. Enter strong denial-state and believe it won't, because that would be evolutionary FAIL to have eyelashes so hard they could scratch the thing they're supposed to be protecting from scratchy things.
Success? No. Eyelash continued to irritate.
Attempt 3: Cause eye to tear up, by classic stratagem of pulling upper eyelid over lower eyelashes to cause productive irritation.
This...is not genius move. What is that--the eyeball equivalent of fighting fire with fire? What was I thinking?
Result: THREE eyelashes in eyeball, and several more on cheeks and fingertips.
However, this does indeed produce tears--though I'm not ruling out the cumulative irritant effect of three freaking eyelashes on my cornea--and two of the eyelashes eventually wash over my lower eyelid and stick on my cheek. I am now back to my original problem.
I encourage the tearing up, trying to wash the last bugger out of my eye. It appears smaller and finer than originally--either it is dissolving, or the original washed out and this is one of the new ones from the ill-advised pull-eyelid-over-lower-lashes stunt.
Eye fills with tears. I try to coax lash off the meniscus and onto my finger. No go. I appear to have highly viscous tears. (They are poison! I should sell vials to the girlfriends of Evil Overlords!)
And then, suddenly... the eyelash disappears. Where did it go? It's not on my fingers, not on my cheeks. I'm pulling out my eyelids, looking under them...nothing! I reevaluate the "it dissolved" theory and my "I have poison tears!" theory. I discard silly theories.
I notice that my tears appear to be gone, but they did not spill over onto my cheek. My nose is suddenly tickly, and I recall that everything in the face is connected, and OH MY CROM MY TEARS JUST DRAINED INTO MY SINUSES AND SUCKED THE EYELASH DOWN WITH THEM.
This means...there is a hair in my throat and I am ack--cough--choke--hack--hack--hack--