Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
...a dispatch from bewilderness
Someone wearing scrubs arrives. She blows her breath up, which sweeps up her bangs. She tells me there has been an accident. Sometimes I know that. Sometimes I don’t.
Everyone wants to be trusted and this is especially true in a close, personal relationship. Like a brain.
I learn that my mind was trashed by a truck. Part of me was left in the rubble. I learn and forget that a few hundred times.
I thought my brain would fix itself. It didn’t. It has been both getting better and getting worse for 18 years.
The human body is a magnificent mix of molecular stuff in which millions of things happen at once. In the human brain, it’s more like billions or trillions or more.
If you took all the landline phones (if any remain) and all the cell phones in the world, on any given day, the number of calls and the trillions of messages per day would not equal the complexity or activity of the messages in a single human brain in a single day.
The bang-blower returns and asks if I know why I’m here. I point to my head. She asks something else. I point to my head again. Maybe I want to tell her, I was hit by a drunk with a truck. She was drunk but not as drunk as she wanted to be. But I can’t. I can’t speak.
