Soap Box Corner

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

This story is very personal to me. It explores brain injury, loss of control, and suicidal thoughts. I wrote it during a rough time in my life, and I kept it raw, which means it may be a difficult read. If you’ve experienced something similar, please know you are not alone. Take care of yourself as you read, and if it brings up heavy feelings, reach out to someone you trust or to a crisis line in your area. Seeking help is an act of courage, and from my own experience, I can say it makes a difference in more ways than you might imagine. I hope you find something in this short story. It was written a few years ago, but it still carries a piece of me.

07:30. Alarm. One press only, never two. Ten-second stretch, counted out, steady, not nine, not eleven, because nine feels rushed and eleven spoils the moment. Sheets pulled tight, corners tucked until they lie flat; three swipes across the blanket to smooth it. To the kitchen: two minutes exactly, no more, no less.

Coffee on. Stove lit. Pan centered on the burner so the handle points to the wall. Bacon in at five minutes sharp: four strips, never three, never five. Back to the dresser: shirts folded into squares, edges aligned, stacked by color, darker to lighter, all seams facing left. Five minutes to complete.

Return to the kitchen. Coffee poured, black, no sugar, no milk, into the chipped mug that has one thin white crescent of missing glaze where my sister knocked it against the sink and laughed. Watch the bacon until it browns evenly; each side turned once. The sound is proof. The smell is the measure. The order is the point.

That was the first twenty minutes of every morning. Not just habit. Ritual. Not just ritual. Control. Until the accident.

I do not remember the impact. One moment I was walking down the road, the sky a flat blue like an old poster. The next there was a hole, not a hole you can fall through, but a gap where the world had been erased for a breath and I had been left on the other side. Then everything went black.

I woke in a hospital. White light. Paper gowns. Machines kept the count I had misplaced. For weeks I could not hold a thought in its place. Faces were faces, but wrong. Names sounded like labels peeled from jars. I said my own name until it felt like a scrap of paper I could paste back onto myself.

When memory returned, it returned leaky and crooked. Colors were louder. Sounds frayed into pieces I did not know how to sew together. A passing car no longer rumbled; it sang a low two-note hum that left my teeth tingling. Coffee, the constant, tasted of metal. Bacon smelled of antiseptic threaded through the fat. The smell, grease laced with disinfectant, became the hinge that tied both mornings to the same wrong place.

My morning routine existed in memory, but my body no longer fit the clothes of habit.

07:30, alarm. The sound hits wrong now, too sharp, too long, not clean the way it used to be. I stretch but lose the count halfway through; my arms invent their own numbers. I make the bed, corners slipping loose. I smooth the blanket once, twice, again; the folds refuse to lie flat. Dresser drawers rasp my fingers like strangers. Shirts stack crooked, colors out of order. No matter how I turn them, the seams will not face the way they used to.

Coffee next. Water poured but the kettle shrieks like a bicycle bell and my heart races. The pan hisses too loud, applause instead of sizzle. Bacon curls in on itself, uneven, wrong. I cover my ears like a child.

The ritual lives in my head. But my body refuses the choreography. I am not starting my day; and I am following someone else’s ritual.

There are other things. Colors invert. My neighbor’s car, once red, looks green, and I almost step into the street because my brain has read the light wrong. Radio voices overlap with the clink of cutlery and sometimes with a smell that has no business being in radio waves. Faces in the mirror are accurate; my own voice sounds low and unfamiliar, as if I’m listening to a recording of someone else’s morning.

Therapy helps in fragments. Count to ten while touching the lip of a mug. Walk the block and name every color you see. Play a single piano note and hold it until it stops making you flinch. Tiny surgeries. They do not fix me. They only rearrange the furniture. How do you live in a body you no longer trust?

Now it is 12:30 a.m., Friday, 9/15/2012, and all that is below me is the cold harbor and a wish for clarity.

The water is a flat, overwhelming void. Harbor lamps smear across the surface like tired notes, light trying to escape a monumental event horizon. The planks sound too small under my shoes. I line up the morning as a list in my head: 07:30, alarm, ten-second stretch, coffee, bacon. The choreography sits there like a relic. I know all the moves. The meaning has been knocked loose.

I imagine, very precisely, the phone that will ring: a neighbor’s voice, clipped; my sister’s name said too loudly into someone else’s ear; the coroner filling forms in a slow, neutral hand. I imagine the funeral director arranging a face into the suggestion of sleep. There is no romance in it, only logistics. Just paperwork, signatures, lists of clothes and pills and the small things someone else will now have to account for.

The private act I imagine as relief becomes a thousand instructions for other people to follow. That is the cruelty I have been avoiding: not that it would end me, but that it would begin a different kind of work for everyone I care about. They would spend their lives answering the questions I refuse to. My sister folding shirts with trembling fingers because folding is something you can do while the rest of you is unglued. A friend replaying a last message until it means nothing. A parent staring at pill bottles as if the labels held secret answers.

They would not be cleaned or healed. They would be recalibrated to this new, practical ruin.

That image, so small, so exact, brings a sudden, terrible clarity. The ledger in my pocket is not a key to peace. It is a receipt someone else would have to reconcile. The thought slices through whatever quiet I thought I wanted. It is not me who would be free. It is everyone else who would be left to collect the pieces.

I close my eyes and breathe deeper than I ever have. The harbor sighs back, patient and infinite. My hands are miming a memory, suddenly busy with one modest, impossible thing: a shirt folded the way my sister folds shirts. It is a small practiced action that means nothing until it means everything. The motion steadies my fingers.

I pull out my phone with a thumb that trembles and type a single line, plain and awful, and press send:

“I’m not okay.”

It is not a grand rescue. It is brittle, utilitarian honesty that names the thing instead of hiding it. It summons a witness into the room. It does not fix the ledger, but it keeps me from handing a new one to someone else.

The harbor keeps breathing. My phone buzzes with a single reply: “On my way. Where are you?”

No music swells. No metaphors explode. Just one person closing the distance. I fold the shirt again, my hands follow the memories of the past, a little slower, and feel, not healed, not whole, but held. I turn from the water toward the small, ridiculous business of being someone else’s responsibility for now. The kettle will whistle. The mug will steam. The ritual will not be perfect, but it will be continued. And that, at least right now, feels like enough.