Icons and editors

...A dispatch from bewilderness

A freelance writer’s life is dangerous even without a truck. My clients owned Oprah and Elmo and Martha Stewart plus Time, New York, Vogue and Kermit the Frog. I survived icons and editors known for bodyguards and body counts, not to mention, killer comments, delivered while dressed to kill.

Then a lady ran out of beer, stole a truck to buy some more, and crushed a parked car. I was in the car. I came to lying on a freezing table in a paper gown. Green people seemed to be speaking. I mean people in scrubs. I couldn’t comprehend what they were saying but I could tell it was something bad.

The room was shivering. I mean I was. Tears burned down my frozen cheeks onto my frozen chest in my frozen gown. I couldn’t speak. I also couldn’t read or write, but I didn’t know it yet. It was a Code 4 emergency, which means my life was threatened. Then it wasn’t my life.

The part of the brain that allows you to speak is about the size of a penny, as in a penny for your thoughts. Other spots just as small let you recognize your child, your mom, your home, your hand. Or not.

Everyone wants to be trusted and this is especially true in a close, personal relationship. Like a brain. I landed in a landscape I’d never seen as a person I’d never been. Once I was someone. Then I was someone else. I needed words I couldn’t find to say things I couldn’t say.

There’s a song that says you don’t know what you’ve lost til it’s gone. With brain damage, you don’t know what you’ve lost cuz you’re gone. Over a few years, I relearned how to see, how to hear, how to walk, how to talk, how to read, how to write, how to deploy a Kleenex, how to operate a fork.

I began making drawings of birds. I had a brace on my right hand so I used my left hand to stick a brush or pen or razor in the brace, then drew, painted, cut and glued by moving my right wrist, not my fingers, guided by my heart.