This story is about birds and words

...And is set in the small somewhat pummeled town perched between my ears.

Brain breaks are like snowflakes. No two are the same.  I had been in working order for 56 years and then I was one big defect composed of ten zillion smaller defects, where nothing had an easy answer, or had no answer at all. When I asked myself, What Happened?, my non-responses were deafening.

Things burst and break sometimes, and I broke just like a little girl. Or rather my brain did. It was like someone had a somewhat gentle grenade and pulled the pin out not just on me, but in me. I lost my hard drive plus the back-up to my hard drive, plus my software, my words and everything else. But I kept writing.

People say motivation doesn't last. Neither do showers. That's why most people recommend doing both every day. I maintained my motivation, kept writing every day and kept taking showers, too.

Eighteen years later, side effects still include nameless things that appear/disappear at once, quick pics that shift and shatter in short breathless bursts. Prose that is causal in its approach to story. Causal, not casual. Same letters, different direction. Not to mention, definition.

And I get things confused. Things from both movies and real life. For example, I remember a fist pounding a table. But whose fist? Or a shotgun standing in a corner, but whose corner? Or a pot of coffee, percolator style, bubbling up into the lid, a few eons ago.

I confuse characters, too, or combine them. A chip off the old block, who inherits family zillions. A dad who died with $77 bucks in his pocket, which his kids used for Thai takeout because “you still have to eat.”

One character taught a course on mid-budget, middlebrow, crowd-pleasing courtroom dramas. One played a pillar of granite. One was a Total Woman. That would never describe me. But I keep on keeping on. And I keep painting birds.

paint and collage by Judith Hannah Weiss