Flowers and a melody

...A dispatch from bewilderness

There are three stages of making a memory: encoding (which means you learn something), consolidation (which means you store it), and recall (which means you can find it again). Learning was hard. Storing was hard. Recall was almost impossible.

In an MRI, regions of my brain lit up when I was asked to recall a meadow with flowers, a walk down a street, a melody, but mostly, they were stuck on “fried.”

I saw something. It erased. I heard something. It erased. I thought something. It erased, too. Every hall seemed featureless. Every wall seemed featureless. Every face. Every place. I could barely read the left side of something before it disappeared — so by the time I get to the right, the entire left — had “left.”

That meant I could not read. Not being able to read also meant I could no longer write. I had been a writer until I was hit by a truck. A drunk with a truck. Then? “Beyond my comprehension” could have described all things as could “over my head” and “out of my depth.” Not to mention, “out of my mind.”

The brain does for the individual what the genome does for the species. It is the book of our life; the photo album, the complex web of learning and memory and story we conflate with who we are. Unless it breaks — which destroys the things we stored to keep them safe, and to keep us safe, too. Maybe I’d never felt safe and that made all things seem more precious to me.

Someone in scrubs showed up and asked if I knew why I was there. I wanted to say 10.0 earthquake, 3.0 skull. He squinted, then frowned. I imagined he was looking for a box on his screen that likely said “can’t read or write.” He frowned again. I doubted there was a box for “earthquake in skull.” I’m pretty sure boxes generate bills. And nineteen years post-truck, I’m still in love with life.