Time doesn’t exist, for you. In the white expanse of a hospital room, the sixteen years of your life have disappeared—there is only Now. A brain injury has turned you into a stranger, but with each painful piece of progress you gain new awareness...but not all of them you recognise. Will you get your life back, or will you have to share the mind and body of this stranger, forever?
So well written I feel like I was watching from inside [her] mind!
Excellent writing … gripping, heart-breaking, emotionally capturing read.
For me…it grabbed at my heart.
An eye-opening vicarious experience! Engaging, entertaining, and informative.
‘Every different capability your body has, is managed by the relevant factory department, and the
workers in it.’
You can see the analogy, in your imagination. Then see the impact of a giant wrecking ball smashing out a corner of the factory, taking a chunk from each floor. You even see the casualties in
your mind’s eye—little plastic people; faceless clones in yellow hard hats and blue overalls, falling from the factory through the fresh hole in the wall.
Shame and worry and grief twist inside you, and you want to curl into yourself and hide from everything you just heard. Everything you see, and fear, in your imagination. Never has your room at the hospital seemed so open and cavernous. You crave a smaller, protective space. Somewhere you can squeeze yourself into, where other things—stronger things—can hold you together, because without them you just may come flying apart in the winds of a scream you can’t control.
The story is becoming impossible to visualise. In your imagination, the fallen powerlines hiss and spit, white sparking stars ... but being wrapped in those surely wouldn’t be survivable. They must
have been dead, by then. Limp. Black ground vines snaking over the road, and over your body.
It doesn’t sound forgettable, yet when you search your memory, you find none of it.
...
Imaginings of the narrative flash through your mind like a show reel, bright with colours illuminated by streetlight, screeching with noise, and with the smell of hot flesh and dirty metal.
You hate going down for naps, even on a good day. Though fatigue weighs down your bones, you hate having to just lie there, staring at nothing, waiting for sleep to finally take over. It doesn’t happen
as fast as it used to. It’s boring and makes you reluctant to nap at all, until you’re sent off to bed like a petulant child.
But it’s worse today, because after you wake up, you have to make the phone call you’d successfully dodged for weeks.
...
You don’t remember finally falling asleep, but it must have happened, because you feel more alert now. But no braver.
