I won't take "No" for an answer from me

...a dispatch from bewilderness

Girl on bird painted by Judith Hannah Weiss

In my first life, words were my job. So strong and precise and potent, you could wash walls or floors or brains with them. You could mobilize, magnetize, globalize, glamorize and all sorts of other things I no longer comprehend.

I needed words to think. I needed words to speak. I needed words to read. To write. To learn. To earn. I needed words I couldn’t find to say things I couldn’t say.

Working memory is how you keep the first part of a sentence active in your mind as you read or hear the last part. Mine was shot. Things happened and then were forgotten as if they hadn’t happened. Or they were scribbled on scraps, then forgotten, as if they hadn’t been scribbled on scraps.

I couldn’t navigate the smallest space or the smallest thing. Not words or places or names or directions or signs on bathroom doors. It’s hard to navigate when you can't decipher anything on your desktop or phone, and can’t tell anyone you can’t. Paul McCartney said, “Take your broken wings and fly.” I try. I fail. I try again.

In an instant, the world was divided into things I used to know, things I never knew and things I wouldn’t know a moment from now. I knew I was holding something, but didn’t know what it was called. A mitten? A kitten? A key for a car?

No brain injury is exactly like any other brain injury but they all become the same struggle to find what has disappeared and unbreak what broke. Now? Most hours of most days, I avoid conversations and write alone, cozy in my cocoon.

I lost a piece of my mind, a few trillion pieces, really, and sometimes it shows on my face. I pray that it won’t, but I know that it does. It happens when I have to be somewhere I can’t find or do something I can’t do or say something I can’t say.

I can have one conversation every two or three days, then wilt or be fried to a crisp. I still think with a stutter and speak with a limp. I still have way less usable space in my brain than I used to.

I write with the urgency that comes when time is short. I have a fragile, intricate thought that may be smart, complex, or even somewhat significant. It fills my mind for an instant, then disintegrates. An image fighting to survive. A race to take it in and get it said. Before it before it disappears.