Imaginary Therapist

a dispatch from bewilderness

Once upon a time, there was a woman named it-doesn’t-matter. She lived in a town called I-don’t-remember and then something happened but I forget what.  This was caused by brain damage.

Side effects of brain damage include:

Stories that diverge, as fluid as finches, or that are cut off, at a moment of high drama, like an old projector snapping the celluloid smack in the midst of a big scene.   “Midst” sounds old. Gen X or Y wouldn’t use a word like that. Neither would boomers.

A therapist asks how often this happens. I mean how often things diverge or get cut off.

She is not a real therapist. She is an Imaginary Therapist. That means I invented her.

I say, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always.”

She asks me to explain.

I say, In my first life, I wrote words in mint condition, sparkling, witty, bracing, brisk. Now I write fragments I call “dots.”  Each dot is a free-standing moment, as close to a memory as one can have when context is killed and sequence is shot.

Brain damaged dots twirl, swirl, swarm away at random times in giant constellations. The fall of Rome, the birth of rock n’ roll, the world’s most ancient river, the world’s most ancient tree. I was at home with the range.

Seurat’s famed painting, “Sunday Afternoon in the Park at Grande Jette” consists of a few million dots. Or a few trillion. So does brain damage. But Seurat’s dots stay in place.

Eight hundred million years ago, microbes banded together, creating multicellular life.  Then there were sharks with wings.  No, really, there were.  Then there were galloping crocodiles.  Really.  I learned that on the job, when I had a job, way-back-when in media.