Audition

...a dispatch from bewilderness

Travel is challenging when you can’t read instructions, decipher directions, or know if you’ve gone right or left. It’s a huge deal for me, when, a few years after the accident, I take Amtrak to Manhattan, then hail a speeding cab to meet my daughter, Hannah, for coffee.

She has chosen a cavernous coffee shop as loud and packed as a stadium. Where I live, southeast of the Blue Ridge Mountains, decibels like these have not been heard since The Civil War. One might find this many humans in two or three counties and this much caffeine in three or four states.

The line snakes in and out of velvet ropes, and everyone seems to be screaming. Before us, two girls prepare for an audition, while behind us, two guys do a postmortem on theirs.

Although supersonic jets are perfect for high-speed travel, you wouldn’t want one to land in your head. But this is the impact most things make on your bruised and broken brain. I mean my bruised and broken brain.

I am auditioning for the part of “normal mom,” sort of like I was before. I want to walk like I did. I want to talk like I did. I want to think like I did. I am embarrassed by me. I can’t read the menu. I don’t know that “large” means small when it comes to coffee. I can’t swipe my credit card.

The present unravels. So does the past. My child said I disappeared. I was her anchor and then I was not. I was my anchor and then I was not. My mind broke and so did we.

I try to form a word or thought. Try to find a link. The kind you make by connecting one word to the other. And discerning where you are. Somewhere cavernous — plus pierced, acid-washed, distressed. Average age 35.

Thumbs are flying. My daughter’s thumbs. I try to speak. My daughter stays tuned to her screen. One moment I was someone. Then I was someone else. “We” have to figure out how to be “me” based on who or what remains.