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“About another person than that person. Imperial Painting in India / Between 1600 and 1660”
George Jackson - Aretha, Sing One For Me
Hello:
I keep thinking about the day I had my third concussion. Actually - this is a question that still bothers me, years later - was it technically my third, or just the second part of the second? It gets hard to disentangle everything from everything else. If you are healing, and then you re-injure yourself before the process is complete, is it a new injury? Or just a part of the same long, continuous thread?
I’m sure I’ve told you about all this before. The first one was easiest. Self-contained. I hit my head in the basement, and then I did all the stuff you’re supposed to do, and then I started feeling better. Pretty linear. After a few months I was healed enough to go to Carlo’s birthday party at the Owls’ Club. I remember opening up my purse and James recoiling from the weed smell, which made me crack up. I remember yelling to Adam over the din of karaoke and conversation that it felt so good to be able to do things like this again. I remember doing the best Prince I’d ever done; I remember an older couple slow-dancing to Carlo’s Roy Orbison. I remember walking home, breathing the cold air, looking up at the clear sky, seeing stars. The next day, our roommate’s SAD lamp shorted out the house again and I was unplugging things in the kitchen. When I stood up and hit my head on a kitchen shelf, I knew immediately. The wave of static sweeping through me: concussion number two.
The third, or whatever it was, happened maybe a year later. I was finally feeling good enough to do a full day out in the world. I planned the whole thing out meticulously. Therapy in the morning, then lunch in the mall downtown, then coffee with a newspaper editor in the east end, then subway back home, or a cab if I really really needed to - I had put aside some money just in case. I felt like a kid going on a field trip. I knew it might take me a day or two to recover from all of this activity but I was excited to try. I had been practicing, pushing my limits a tiny bit more every day, exactly the way I’d done the first time, exactly like the doctors and the pamphlets told me to. I was being so good all the time. Tiptoeing up to the threshold, picking out patterns in the noise. My whole life was about learning to accept the ups and downs, riding the wave. I did nothing too extra, nothing too intense. Honestly now I look back on this woman and think, jesus. I worked a few days a week at my stupid stultifying bottle shop job where the customers treated me like shit and the manager was skimming money out of the tip pool and I hauled crates of beer up and down a staircase obstacle course booby-trapped with WSIB violations and every day I made it all the way to the end. Sometimes I would complain to my loved ones and then apologize profusely for complaining, feel covered in a physical film of guilt and shame for days. Sometimes I drank a thimbleful of beer and paid for it dearly the next day. I set my alarm. I went for walks, I meditated, I rode my bike, diligent, determined. I kept dutiful notes. I cried in the shower and then when I got out the crying was done. The doctors told me: You’ll see the change - not over days, but over weeks and months. You’ll see yourself getting better, life getting easier. I have definitely told you this part of the story before. It made an impression on me. It does happen, they kept saying. It will happen. And it did, slowly. Things had started to change. Just a little longer, I kept thinking. I could see the end.
I was trying to pick an outfit that would work for everything. It was exciting to get dressed not for sitting at a cash register or floating around the house or taking a walk around the block but to present myself to people - to be perceived as a human woman out in the world. I put on concealer and lipstick. I put on tights and a dress I had not worn in years - hunter green with tiny white dots stitched into the material, short but still professional. Every time I wore this dress I thought about the day I bought it, when I had tried it on in the vintage store in Montreal and a woman I did not know told me it looked perfect, one of those sincere stranger-compliments you collect and hoard like precious coins. It barely fit around the sleeves anymore but I still felt good in it. Real.
I was trying on different shoes. The only full-length mirror in the house was upstairs, in our bedroom, and Carlo was still sleeping. It was his day off and I didn’t want to wake him. We had a little desk by the living room window with a chair, and there was a big round mirror over the mantlepiece. I pulled the chair over to it and stood up on it so I could see my whole self in the mirror, and when I did that I hit the top of my head on the big ugly rental-classic light fixture that hung down from the ceiling. It all happened so fast. I felt the fizzing, the static, the force, and I knew right away, just like I’d known each time before, that I was fucked.
Still, I tried to do my big day out. I’d had minor slip-ups before, bumps on the head, that turned out to be nothing. Each time they’d sent me into a spiral of panic - What if I have to start all of this again? - and each time Carlo would talk me down and I’d somehow fall asleep and then I’d wake up the next morning feeling more or less fine, miraculously. Maybe this was just one of those times and I was just being paranoid. I put on my coat and I got on the subway and I rode to therapy and when I tried to turn on the channel of my inner monologue all I could hear was a harsh electric buzz. In the appointment I told him what had happened and he said Well you seem like you’re doing okay and I said Yeah I think it’s probably fine and then we talked about who knows what for an hour. I identified strongly with this man’s desire not to acknowledge my anxiety. I figured he probably knew what he was doing.
Afterwards I walked to the mall. In the thickening crowd of people the feeling got louder. I called Carlo and told him what had happened, trying to keep my tone light. Well, you sound okay, he said, but I could hear the worry flickering inside. Call me if it gets worse. I went to the mall and stood in a store and felt the world starting to flatten in the old familiar way. The music sounded like how it might feel to chew on a metal coat hanger. The light touched down on my consciousness like a buzzsaw biting into soft wood. I escaped into the soft white-tiled world of the atrium. It was a monday, mid-afternoon, quiet. I found an empty bench in front of a travel agency and sat in front of it, eating a fruit salad that at some point I had acquired, though I had no memory of how or where. I closed my eyes and tried to meditate. Time slipped out from under me, dangerous and easy. When I opened my eyes, I was staring at the poster in the window of the storefront, which depicted a beautiful couple enjoying a cruise. I will never forget this image, I thought, incorrectly.
This was the moment when I crossed the threshold. The burning at the top of my skull kicked on like a radiator on the first cold day. I summoned an uber without looking at my phone, a skill I’d forgotten I had. I started mentally composing the email to my boss reflexively, without my own permission. When I got in the car the driver had music playing very loud and I did not ask him to turn it down even though it hurt, because I knew this was the last time I would be hearing loud music for a while, and though the version of me who could enjoy it was rapidly dissolving from my body, she was not yet entirely gone. I opened the window so I could feel the air on my face. The car, I swear to god, was taking me from one dimension to another, from the disappearing present into a brand new version of the past. This all sounds like a bummer, but in this moment I was not really upset. I knew there would be time for that later. I remember thinking: This is not something everyone gets to experience. Usually it takes such a long time for your life to change. To be precisely inside the moment where things split in two - when you are pulled back to another version of yourself, away from now - has value. I might never feel this exact way again, I thought, and I was wrong about that too.
The other thing is we got a rescue puppy and I’ll tell you all about it later but can you BELIEVE this:
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I’m gonna just keep putting this here! It’s my book, in case you would like to pre-order it from Random House Canada. I just tried to search for the link so I could put it here and instead just typed the phrase “please pre-order my book” into the google searchbar, in case you’re wondering how the puppy-raising lifestyle is impacting my brain. Please pre-order my book.
Carlo’s basketball corner:
Every DeMar DeRozan Game Winning Buzzer Beater