I've been keeping a secret, part one
from Brain Damaged News
I’ve done things I can’t say with people I can’t name in places I can’t describe. Something took my words away.
A scruffy green angel is floating under ceiling lights, looking upside down at me. Things are beeping. Beeping means someone’s alive. I was strapped on a board looking up at the world. The scruffy angel asks me a question. I point to my head.
The world is divided into things I can’t say and more things I can’t say. This is called aphasia. Plus thing I used to know, things I never knew, and things I won’t know a moment from now. That is called amnesia.
I point to a chair because I can’t say “chair.” I do the same with a shoe. I mime drinking from a bottle because I can’t say “thirsty” or “water” or “drink.”
I couldn’t say shower
I couldn’t say cup
I couldn’t say down
I couldn’t say up
I couldn’t say please help me put on my socks
A doctor arrived. He kept pulling the sleeves of his shirt. Another doctor arrived, perhaps on another day. Her words fell on the floor with a clunk. I couldn’t understand what she said, but I could tell it was bad.
I spent decades telling folks how to prevent everything bad, protect everything important, and procure everything good. All they wanted or needed to know, have, want, wear, buy, try, lose, use, taste, sip, skip, slip into or out of. That was called freelance writing. My clients owned Oprah and Elmo and Martha and Elle, plus Vogue, The New Yorker, and Kermit the Frog.
Then a drunk driver stole a truck and compressed a parked car. I was in the car. I learn and forget that a few hundred times. I’m not an expert on brain injury. I am a person who has one. Those three words are rarely seen together, “Person. Brain. Injury.”
In cartoons, people like me are hilarious, especially in the scenes where skulls get smashed. Think baseball bats, frying pans, and coconuts on craniums. Still tethered to the board, I just kept looking up.
The angel comes back. I’m closed for repairs. I began working in media when I was in my 20s and magazine covers were painted on caves. Back then, we didn’t have Chatbots. We did the writing ourselves.
My words had to get the “main point” across and I had to know what it was. That gets reversed when you’re brain injured. You knew something a moment ago, but you don’t know it now.
There were no angels most of the time. But once in a while, there was one. He looked tired and green. I mean his scrubs were green. It was not the whole Sistine. My brain was scarred and swollen. My mouth, my chest, my vocal chords. But I didn’t know it yet.
Thank you.
My God.