Erasures
One of the small ironies of our long recovery from the car wreck—now nine years in the past—one that has gradually bloomed into awareness, is how we were told how lucky we were not to have sustained head injuries, and how for the first few years we did in fact heal mostly in our bones—with bruised organs and strained tendons leading the way—so much so that at five years out you could say we’d recovered fully. Despite breaking both my feet, one of my knees, one femur, one hip, as well as cracking twelve ribs, my sternum, and a small piece of backbone, I could walk again, even play tennis, shoot baskets, hike, etc. (It’s amazing what PT and weight training and Pilates and yoga can do. The way out is through, my dancer aunt told me early in the process, and she wasn’t wrong.) But what’s become clear to us both as the years have scrolled by, is how much we in fact did suffer head injuries, and how much those hidden maladies crop in our daily lives now: and I say crop up, but really it’s a sort of erasure process. It’s more like parts of memories have been cropped out.
A case in point. Just last week I received a long email from a man who had attended the MFA program I taught at just before the accident (this is summer, 2011), who it seems I’d befriended. He wrote of riding back to Asheville together with a mutual friend, and how he came over to our house for a potluck. When I wrote him back, I felt obligated to tell him that I didn’t remember him at all. That I remembered the ride back, and even that there was a student with us on the ride, but nothing about him. Nothing about a potluck. And nothing, most importantly, about our friendship—or his work that I had supposedly praised—during the residency. Quite a sizable memory lapse, or erasure, large enough to make me wonder what else I have lost access to, what else has been shorn from my memory.
Another irony. That at 54, it isn’t all that easy to tell what is a by-product of that accident and what just comes with aging. But here, with this man who writes back to me admitting that it hurts to be forgotten like that (but that he understands completely), clearly whatever closed-head injury I suffered from the head-on impact has a long and subtle influence on my present day life. I can’t help but imagine fog-like tentacles reaching up out of my body from the past, or some sort of gnarled root system slowly entangling me. And today, on this rain-sogged weekend afternoon, I can’t help feely lucky and happy to be alive and okay with fog and roots, and even lapsed or erased memory; at least I have this very moment, right now, words to arrange on the page in an attempt to stave off the inevitable. And friends and fellow writers to read them and, if I’m lucky, feel moved.