50 shades of gone girl

...a dispatch from bewilderness

Fyi, I am supposed to keep my mouth shut. That is because I am brain injured. This was caused by a drunk with a truck.

Every small thing, like how to hold my head, I had to learn again. Holding a pen, I couldn’t.   Using a keyboard, I can’t. Counting change, I couldn’t.   People like me don’t count. Yet I still failed to keep my mouth shut.

My story is stranger, more complicated, more beautiful, more magic, more tragic, and way more funny than you might expect.  

I mix up instructions like: Use your ears to clean your spoons, and mix up stories like 50 shades of gone girl on the train with a dragon tattoo. 

I am missing the person I used to be and the person who is my daughter or was my daughter, and maybe she is missing her mom.

I am missing where we used to live and the “Hannah tree” we planted when she was small.

My name is J.  I used to have a name with more letters, but that was before the accident. I imagine writing a book.  I top that by imagining a book agents want and publishers print.

I start by using my left hand to stick a pen into the brace that lets my right hand scratch semi-coherent scraps on napkins, paper cups, coffee stirrers, popsicle sticks.

It’s pretty hard to write a book no matter what, and a bit harder with a few billion breaks in your brain.  You can’t write from memory.  You can only write from scraps.

Many media companies are now saying they “are committed to publishing stories written and edited by humans.”  This means they prefer human intelligence (as opposed to AI). Bright, shiny, undamaged intelligence shining through bright, shiny, undamaged prose. Which precludes prose like this and people like me.