(Appeared in Thirty West Publishing’s Afterimages, December 2023.)
I closed my eyes for weeks—the night a pair of strangers pummeled, kicked, and curb-stomped me. Like an atomic blast, my traumatic brain injury erased me from the world I knew and loved, hurling burning chaos across the landscape of my life. A mushroom cloud obscured my reality—and the subsequent black rain soaked me to the skin. When the nuclear winter of my coma subsided, I returned to the world with so much to learn about my new self.
For a start, my mouth didn’t work. When I opened it, emerging words fought for the front of the line, coalescing in a distorted jumble—a traffic jam encamped along the highway of my helpless tongue. My words swerved violently into one another, edging for clearance, plummeting over the side, landing at my feet. Their intended recipients—my mother, doctors, therapists—stared, open-faced. They asked me to slow down; they asked me to repeat myself. I learned to pick my words up, dust them off, and use them more carefully.
My left arm didn’t work. Doctors said I’d developed contracture. I didn’t understand, but I felt this contracture shortening and pulling the muscles and tendons of my arm inward; it curled at the elbow, fist touching chest, wrist bending downward, bringing fingers in contact with the underside of my forearm like a broken wing. As agonizing days drifted, I watched my arm become a grotesque knot, remembering I was left-handed. Lying in bed, I felt tendons contracting beneath the cast covering my arm. I always wanted a cast as a little boy. Getting one meant you did something courageous, like crash your BMX bike. And I loved signing my friend’s casts in elementary school. But now, a plaster sheath remained on my arm less than a week before another took its place. No one bothered signing. With an electric saw, doctors sliced open my casts like warm bread, freeing me momentarily before applying a new one. I wore twenty-three.
My left leg didn’t work. Contracture twisted my hip, contorting the limb into a question mark—the pain a battalion of exclamation points fashioned into spears. In the evening, I rolled in my wheelchair to my mother’s desk, where I typed with my right hand. After an hour or two, I transferred from my chair to the couch, watching TV and playing with my mother’s dog, careful not to bump him with my cast.
For a time, my memory refused to work, details eluding me like bandits. I learned to write everything down in an unreadable right-handed scrawl. I learned to carry a pen and notepad. I learned to become right-handed. With practice, my messy new handwriting matched my messy old handwriting. My memory improved because I wrote constantly—and I learned to write by living in my memories.
I remembered that I used to play the drums—for twelve invigorating years, pursuing a music career. I suspected I might never touch them again because playing hurt too much, physically and emotionally. Coordinated independence, which all musicians develop, allowed me to play distinct rhythms with each limb. After my injury, I could hardly hold my drumsticks. After my injury, I banished my musical equipment to the garage—to the unvisited museum of my former self. Years later, I practically gave it all away: I sold my drums and cymbals, my snare and my chair; I sold my drum cases and the wooden dolly I used to transport them from van to backdoor to stage. I emptied the museum.
After my injury, I lived alone, writing and remembering. As a musician, I’d kept a sporadic journal. Now, it was a repository for stories, conversations, letters, lists, and linguistic keepsakes. After my injury, memories flickered until I captured them on the page. I described watching purple blood ooze from the staples lining my little brother’s head when, years before, the same thing happened to him: he was assaulted arbitrarily. My brother once called me his hero. Now, I sat helplessly beside his hospital bed, wondering if he’d ever be the same. Later, I wrote about our hometown where he was attacked: a polluted, bankrupt wasteland deteriorating as it sank into hopelessness, its desperate inhabitants wet-mouthed, wide-eyed, and lost, like abandoned pets along the side of the road. Writing about my hometown sharpened my memories. I moved away years ago, but my stepfather told me I was a product of my environment; I would always be a part of that place.
My traumatic brain injury taught me how to live by teaching me how to adapt. To survive. I took a job in a bookstore, eventually meeting and working alongside the woman I fell in love with. The woman I married. The woman I cherish. The woman who encouraged me to play the drums again. We relocated, and I returned to school in my forties.
Today, I teach a class called “Writing Our Memories.” I show my undergraduate students how writing about your past brings it back into focus. I tell them we learn from our past by studying it and examining it for clues about who we might become. When I lived the life of a struggling musician in the years leading up to my injury, I had no idea my past informed my future. In class, we study personal essays about love and pain, excitement and loss, triumph and disappointment. Together, we write in response to these essays. And I hope that as they learn, I do too. I still wonder if my injury has taught me enough.
Jason M. Thornberry’s writing appears in JMWW, Los Angeles Review of Books, North Dakota Quarterly, Harbor Review, Rejection Letters, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He was recently nominated for Best of the Net. Jason earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. He Lives in Seattle with his wife and dog and is currently seeking a home for his first novel.
Jason M. Thornberry 