Cicatrix: Scar of a Healed Wound
Halfway sitting on my bed, I am aware of voices and the sounds of hospital carts rolling and staff voices and an image of a brown-haired nurse gently fluffing my pillow, the soft sounds? dissipating as she smiles and asks me if I want breakfast.
In a haze of awakening images and thoughts I struggled to disentangle what was real from what was apparently becoming real, and what was disappearing irritably like smoke drifting over a rocky road, almost physically querulous.
Where is the structure of my thoughts? What is the difference between remembering and misremembering? Is the telescope of consciousness enhancing or diminishing my awareness (frittering away its clarity and structure like a snow crystal in bright sunshine)? And is the memory of a lie as strong as that of a truth? Or are truths like stars in a cloudless sky at midnight?
These few scattered thoughts withered as the nurse,hands on hips, waited for my answer to the question with her smile: “Want some breakfast?”
Fragments of thoughts, pieces of consciousness: I drank from the well of scattered organization. Memory askew, tilted like a drunk, tell-tale indications of organization vanishing and reappearing like a flashlight turning on and off in a fog. I yawned. When I failed to give the right side of my body attention, it quickly dissipated.
The beauty of an awakened person is foreign to an unawakened one like me –? inadequate to the task of being fully alive.
As I reflexively look through the micro nuances of dimension, color and anticipated depth of my room, all my five senses converge into the nurse who I just realized, apparently for some time, has been talking to me.
She is holding a small circular tray with two brown bottles and a tissue box on it.
The nurse is smiling while she waits for me to be present.
“Here you are, Billy,” she says in what is a kaleidoscopic, echoing voice. The room seems to lightly shimmer in color and askew synchronicity attuned to her voice. No wonder I hear not merely a voice, but a mini-cascade of quietly shattering sound:? four words –here you are Billy – displace the nurse’s simple, quiet, statement of attention.
What’s next?
A thought in the midst of the initial effects of a stroke is not whole. It is a cognitive diaspora, an unfulfilled flicker of awareness, a light tempered by one’s self-evident ignorance. It is more a hopeful, anticipated realization of awareness than any awareness itself or a familiarity with dissipating hope. Yet now, enveloped in the entirely unanticipated novelty of a sensory kaleidoscope, even that dissipation disintegrates, and I am, just for a micro-instant, completely alone, bodiless, thoughtless.
All is totally quiet. Every cell in my body is awake and anticipating in innate silence.
Looking down, I see that I am heavily clothed with leather leggings and boots. I feel the weight of multiple layers of clothes – long sleeves, wide-brimmed hat and a heavy coat now noisily and steadily whipping in the wind. I raise my eyes and see that I am in the midst of a vast, multicolored, flowering, beautiful, rolling plain with mountains in the distance, towering evergreen trees studding the landscape, as far as the eye can see. Vivid and magnificent.
“Billy?”, gently asks the nurse. The transition from my presence in the landscape – or the landscape’s presence in me -- was seamless, a cicatrix, the scar of a healed wound.