Fading to Bolivian

...A dispatch from bewilderness

Head gear for a head that’s been hurt

I’m not a bipolar stripper or a former maid/ junkie /abused child / rock star / alcoholic/ vaper/ glue sniffer / nerd.  They each wrote bestselling memoirs. I’m a former kid. A way-back, way-former kid who lost her first life and mind. And her former agents when she was hit by a drunk with a truck.

The main character doesn’t know what she just wrote or read. Neither do I. This provides a new story every few words. Some people say I don’t seem brain injured. What they see is in their head. What I deal with is in mine. Or went missing from mine.

I have to make writing — my writing — “handicapped accessible.” I have to make it handicapped accessible so I can do it. With the mind I have now.

In fact, I have to make anything I do handicapped accessible so I can do it. Anything I did with relative ease in my first life is not easy now. Too few resources. Too much to do.

This is not a drill. Someone in scrubs puts more of something in the IV. Perhaps it is anti-aging, anti-wrinkle, anti-old. Perhaps it sucks out cellulite. Perhaps it just sucks.

Some days go better than others. Some people are from another planet. Perhaps I am one of them. I was a professional. I imagined things. Then something no one could imagine happened. Someone ran out of beer, stole a truck, careened around a curb, and crushed a car that contained me.

Imagine for a moment that I’m a chief air traffic controller. To land and take off each plane that needs to land and take off 24/7, I need to safely manage, say, 20 intact runways. I have 4.

Or I need to land and take off 16 fewer planes and let 16 runways sit. Just sit. That doesn’t work for me. Things feel urgent at this age. Things are urgent at this age. The runways are in my head. So are the planes. And everything I want to do. Like regain an agent and publish a book.

Back home, I must make dinner, but I can’t think, let alone cook. Let’s see, maybe there are tortillas. No, I’m tired. I suggest we go out, I mean I go out. I can’t sit down, I can’t get up, I can’t talk, I can’t stop talking. I lose my bearings every few words and say strange things like “fading to Bolivian.” Then I return to the PC and attempt to land a plane.