Disappeared

...a dispatch from bewilderness

This story takes place in my head. My new head. It captures the upheavals, aftermaths, key events and trends of the last few minutes. Or decades. Hard to tell which. Time and space dissolve, slide from first person to second, unspool present and past. I’m nearly 75, but my brain is 18.

image by Judith Hannah Weiss

Post-truck, a tester asked me to say the name of my mother, my father, my address, the name of my job if I had a job before something happened that put me there. That means I had to find it, know it, name it. I couldn’t.

I began scratching anything I recalled on any surface I could find – paper plates, paper cups, placemats, napkins, coffee stirrers and Popsicle sticks. Fragments not in alphabetical order, not in numerical order, not in chronological order, but out of order, like me.

They jumped from first person to second and future to present and took place in diverse settings like Saturn and Utah at the same time.

One scrap said: 

First, I couldn’t say it. Then I still couldn’t say it.

One scrap said:

The brain you have reached has been disconnected. So have the legs and the arms and the feet.

The accident came back in waves.  It was dark. It was tight. A truck crashed into a car. I was in the car. Each scrap contained part of a picture – that could somehow make me whole. Or at least more whole than now.  So I’d feel less broken, more normal, less scared.  And less like there was a hole in my soul.

I’m sharing my story not because I think it is exceptional, but because I know it is not.  Disabled people are the single largest minority in the world, and likely the least heard from. It’s also the only minority anyone can join at any time.

Every 65 seconds, Alzheimer’s takes up residence in another American. Every 9 seconds, or eight times more often, traumatic brain injury breaks another American brain.