Blessed Are the Breathing

by Michelle Cristiani

My brain is
An extraordinary creature
A tribe of primitive rituals
A balance
Of cacophony
and silence.

It started with the flu.
No it didn’t: it was my family, not me, with the flu.
It started with the headache.
No it didn’t. Back up a few days.
Or years? Did it start with my birth?
It started with the dizziness.

My mind is
One magnificent half
Doubled in a blood-filled hole
A sequence
Of imagery
And violence.

I know this script well: I had a stroke, I say.
You say, You’re too young. Or, sometimes, how old are you?
Whatever answer I give is irrelevant by the time you ask it, isn’t it?

* * *

I’m told I argued with my son that night; I don’t remember it. I don’t remember our dinner together, or putting our three sick children to bed. I do remember my husband, sick with flu, falling asleep early on a spare bed so as not to contaminate me.  I remember the joy of a quiet house at night, everyone tucked in and sleeping, healing, and I the warrior, taking care of them all. And I remember reading in bed until ten o’clock, and, when I stood, listing to the right until I hit the wall.

     In the movies, when someone gets shot or injured, they grip the wound and their legs buckle to the side. They stagger, while the air itself seems to push them over. This is how it was. I bounced off the wall, against my will, all the way out of the room.

     My brain positions me firmly in present tense from here to forever; no past action matters. By the time I get to the hallway, I find myself glued to the right wall. A magnet pulls to the right, no matter how straight I step. Is this gravity? Isn’t gravity supposed to be downwards? The past is gone and I can’t access it. I’m scared.

     My husband is in a fevered half-sleep. He tells me, in slurred-with-fever speech, to take deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth. I try. I imagine a purring cat on my neck, rumbling and soft. But every once in a while, I burst out, frightened of my symptoms. I can’t see! Why can’t I see? I’ll just close my eyes and breathe.  But I’m dizzy, so dizzy, queasy-dizzy, when I close my eyes.

     In the lucid moments, I yell that we must call 911. Think. Call. Empty. Repeat.

     At about two a.m., my ten-year-old son appears. I have the phone! He says. Should I call 911?

     Think. Empty. Repeat.

     I should have said yes. We should have said yes. But my husband is barely lucid, and I am barely lucid.  And in truth, I fear. I fear that we call an ambulance, spend all this money to find I have the flu. I can already hear an EMT saying, Look, Lady, we got heart attack victims out there. You’re fine. Get some rest and leave us alone. I am more afraid of that unlikely conversation than I am of my own mysterious illness.

     By three a.m. my lucid moments are more and more rare. My husband staggers over with a towel, so I can wretch into it while in bed.  I crawl, more covert-soldier-like than all fours, to the bedroom. Seconds, minutes, or hours crawl by.  I wretch and he sweats. I sweat and he wretches. Time stops.

     My husband calls the doctor at 5 a.m.  I can hear her through the phone, calmly and slowly saying the numbers I’d hoped for:

     Think. Empty. Empty. Empty.

     When I hear sirens, I celebrate. someone will get me what I need. I’m sure, now, whatever I need isn’t in this house.

     Seconds, minutes, hours pass.

     There is a man and a woman.

     I am on a gurney and I don’t know how I got here.

     I breathe fresh air and I don’t know how I got here.

     I am in the ambulance and I don’t know how I got here. A kind man hands me a bag with a plastic ring on top. When I finish vomiting, he puts something on my tongue. Probably a migraine, he says. They’ll take care of you. Between brown-outs I own my illness, and already celebrate its recovery.

* * *

A heart or soul is
what doesn’t matter
In the face of
what’s behind my face.

* * *

I am in the emergency room and I don’t know how I got here.

     I am in a gown.

     I am in a bed surrounded by what seems to be a cast of thousands.

     A doctor asks me to stand up. I note that he is smaller than I am. And though I obey, I know before I even try that I will not be able to stand. I put my arm around his shoulders and ease off the bed, and as I predicted my right side buckles, and it takes all he has to prevent my pulling him down with me. I’d already told him I couldn’t walk; this outcome was so obvious to me. But about it, I am emotionless. Empty, noiseless, again.

     Another doctor appears to test my right versus left side. To my amazement, I feel nothing at all on my right arm or leg. I’m shocked, but not in the least worried. Everything in front of me is nothing more or less than what it is – there is no subtext, no emotional noise. Even when lucid, I am robotically, preternaturally present. It’s as if the blank moments have erased interpretation. I am baggage-free and fascinated. I’m nothing and everything. I am time itself.

* * *

I am away from home for another month.

     I lose peripheral vision, muscle mass and control, mobility, balance, swallowing, concentration, memory.

     It takes a lifetime, or more, to recover.

* * *

Extraordinary
Not ordinary
Not like you
Anymore

* * *

I think to my life before this, when I can think. Was there life before this? It was bleak and cloudy, like the February weather surrounding it. It was full of what now seems not worth suffering for: long hours driving to places I didn’t want to go. Trading in nonsense, small talk, instead of creativity. And all the cliches, real as my left hand and not at all cliche: if it is not in front of me, if it is not now, it’s not important. I am here right now, and the only real things are those I can sense around me. I was so unhappy, wasn’t I? I see that clearly now. And now…I don’t know if this is happiness. But even as I lose clarity, even as I lose memory, I am present. I know, at least, that this is not sadness. Far from it.

     I never before this day (now Friday, I know that much) pondered how muscles, limbs, faces, move because on some level, we tell them to. We don’t realize we are doing this, but the simple act of wanting to move makes it happen. For me, now, the want is not enough. I reach for the wet, green sponge – my only companion since I can swallow no water – but my aim is no longer true.

* * *

It started with the dizziness
And the dizziness is all I know.

* * *

I experience two flavors of vertigo. First, a spinning sensation. My body is intact, and I can feel where I am in space. This is what I had before called light-headed, dizzy. In French, literally, “the head that turns.”

     The second type of vertigo is when I cannot locate myself in space, as if gravity no longer holds. I have two constant images when this is happening – because words are hard to reach, and I think in pictures, like a child: astronauts in spaceships, floating wantonly, sometimes upside-down. And also, the Vitruvian Man, by Leonardo Da Vinci, the man in the circle. He looks to me, with his superimposed limbs, like he is flailing.  He looks like he’s in the middle of a gyroscope. That is me.

     I move slowly, when I have to move at all. But when I turn too quickly in bed, with either head or body, the Vetruvian begins. The world, which seemed so solid and literal a moment before, spins around me in hallucinatory realness. Mostly, the foot of the bed tilts towards me, until I almost fall backwards on my head. I am nowhere. There is no space, and I am nothing in it. I turn everywhere, and there is nowhere to turn.

     Many times before, like many of us, I rode roller coasters for fun. And many times, those coasters would loop, while we screamed, put our hands up, laughed, reveled in the adrenaline. Roller coasters, like most of our chosen thrills, are dangers wrapped in safety. We don’t really expect to fall, and that’s what makes it fun. But here, now. I have no guarantee I’ll come back down, or where I’d land if I do. In fact, landing would be welcome, because I would feel something real against me, a cold floor perhaps. Instead, I float, the narrow bed a magic carpet and me, with no magic words to command it.

     The guard rails are presumably there to keep patients from falling right out, but for me there is the added bonus of gripping them as reminder of the only solid thing my body can touch. If these are truly real in the room, then that must mean I am too. No one is here to pinch me, to remind me I’m here. So the rails catch my white knuckles, and keep me in the world.

* * *

What You Might See When You Have Vertigo and Close Your Eyes

Ring around the rosy
Flinching fishing lines
and tape measures that crinkle
but never snap
Synchronized swimmers
Ice skaters on carousels
and parachuters who jump
from hot air balloons
but never land

Lassos
Flowing iced coffee
from pitcher to glass
Frothy whale spouts
Web-weaving spiders
and storytellers of old

Girls with sashes
Wrapping your maypole
with blood cells
tempered by mermaids
and blood cells
tempered by disco balls

* * *

Because the vertigo—both types—is near-constant, it is also vomit-inducing. I vomit often, even if nothing more than the water from the friendly green sponge.

* * *

The room is spinning
The ground is moving
I can do a handstand
by making the world tip forward
a hundred and eighty degrees.
No absentee
No defecit
Instead
A superpower
Empathetic in its solitude
What if vertigo
is really
just feeling the earth spinning on its axis?

* * *

Space quite literally bends before my eyes, and closing my eyes doesn’t change the bend one bit.

     He says: I just want you to come home. I say nothing, and feel no emotion at the obviousness of the impossibility.

     I squeeze his hand and pant, in spurts, much the way I did when I was in labor. His hand, surely crushed to the bone, keeps me now on shore when all threatens to wash me away. Eventually, over an hour later, I settle into acceptable vertigo, the paradox of stable motion, and he kisses me one last time before disappearing back into the life of which I am no longer a part.

After the vertigo, the next visitor is the pain. It takes the shape of a groan on my right back neck, deeper than muscle, unmoving and unabating. Ice helps slightly, but as the blurry doctor already proved in the morning’s wee hours, I cannot feel temperature on my skin. Hot pads are out of the question; I can’t gauge when I’m too hot, so it is ice, or nothing. If I am offered or taking pain medication, I do not know it – or I know it intensely like clockwork as it wears off.

     My voice also loses strength.  Although my speech is intact, I am slower to respond, and moreso, care little about bothering to do so. When I do speak, I am hoarse, as if I’ve been cheering at a concert all night. I still cannot drink water, or suck on ice, because I will choke if I do. Along with my coarse voice box, my right esophagus and trachea are weakened and numb. It feels funny to swallow, uneven – even my throat has vertigo. I am so happy to be able to form sentences with relative ease, and retain long-term memory, and I am only starting to be hungry. So the swallowing is unimportant right now. The green sponge winks at me. We’re in this together.

     I am sure I see doctors during this time, but I remember none. My only important visitors are the therapists.  The first is a perky occupational therapist with an assistant. I can barely see them, but from her tone I recognize her to possess the most necessary combination of professionalism, friendliness, and over-enthusiasm required of her profession. She asks me if I know what an occupational therapist does, and I admit that I do not. She always jokes, she says, that more people are struck by lightning than know what an OT does. It is funny, in its way, but I find myself attempting to calculate if that would really be true, which is nonsensical. The literal ramifications of her sentence distract me. And I miss her next three sentences because of it.

     I’m not sure I can explain what OT is even after her description, but it’s something about getting me back to my normal life. Fr now I don’t care, and it’s not worth the energy of asking. Before she leaves, she says she wishes she could have met me at a coffee shop. Apparently we had a lively conversation; I already don’t remember it. I do too, I say. You seem like fun.

     I never see her again.

* * *

My husband returns the following day with our children. Their faces uncrackable codes, from a time when I took them for granted. They are wearing masks, and are so openly, unabashedly happy to see me, seemingly unconcerned with the tubes and wires and croaky voice.

     I hope that instead of indifference, what they display is an inability to see what’s wrong with me. I worry about both sides of the spectrum: that they’re fragile and shaken, and that they take my love and my presence for granted.

     I delight in showing them the test I’ve undergone countless times already: put your arms out in front of you, palms up like you’re holding a pizza box. They do so, and their arms stay where they put them. I do so, and my right arm drifts to my right as if I am ushering in a round of applause. We marvel.

     The applesauce I am finally cleared to eat is in front of me, and I can slowly, with determination, eat it with my left hand. But my daughter revels in the role of feeding me, and it is wonderful. I had done this for her so many times, for so many months. She looks just as content with it as I had felt, when she was a baby.

     My sons, on the other hand, are uncomfortable, shifting. They complain about issues that have nothing to do with me: it’s hot in here. They can’t breathe through the masks. They’re itchy, and they’re hungry. When I am done with my applesauce they all smooch me and shuffle off. Their poreless skin feels just the same, on my left cheek at least, as it ever did before.

* * *

Supposed bright sun
We don’t rotate: we pull.

What is so deep about a mother-shaped hole
That could not be filled up
By ashes to ashes
and tears and time?

Jump, little boy.
You won’t move this rock.
Ashes to ashes, pressed by time.
Rocks don’t need fists
to punch back.

* * *

My husband  gives me a gift typical of him and suitable for me: a copy of an image of Dante’s hand holding the hand of his love. We fold it into my journal – which he brought me even though writing is out of the question – and though I can’t pull it out to view it regularly, I remember its image, and imagine our holding hands just that way, when I’m all alone and spinning.

* * *

Meanwhile, vacation-like: room service, TV with cable (we don’t have that at home). No chores to complete, from cleaning to laundry; and mostly unscripted days, which in itself is novelty incarnate. Not like a vacation: I can’t see, I can’t walk. A small price to pay for a vacation? Some moments I actually think so.

* * *

Once I’m in the main ward, a physical therapist appears and asks if I want to try walking once I get settled. Of course I do. I would also, I think, like to look out a window. I quickly find that I am light sensitive, so the curtains are mostly closed, but I can keep track of the sun, and I also have a clock. These simple pleasures delight me.

     The physical therapist wheels me to a hallway, and places a walker in front of me. She helps me to stand, and asks me to take steps if I can. I am able to put one foot in front of the other, slowly, in a penguin-like shuffle. My legs are in the way of their own momentum. They simply will not accept my brain’s commands. When we walk, or reach for a water cup, we need not consciously think, WALK! REACH! Not even toddlers think it. It is not thought, really; it’s primitive; it’s will. And all my will transfers to my legs and the shuffle is all the thanks I get.

I wake up from a dream where I run into my therapist and she says, nothing ever looked so good as a stroke does on you. When she says this I am wearing a lovely black skirt and heels, but I stumble out of my shoe as I walk down the ramp.

     When I see my therapist next I say, please tell me I’ll wear heels again. You will, she says. Hey, I actually wore heels just last night, she says. She smiles. I don’t. My mother used to joke that I came out of the womb in heels. My left leg kicks in the wheelchair, lopsided resistance against neurological walls.

* * *

I do walk what seems to me hardly at all, perhaps 10-15 feet. I am exhausted, if for nothing else than that’s the most I’ve moved my body in days, and I am barely eating. I lounge back in bed, careful not to turn to the left, proud of my efforts.  But the vertigo still roars like a sleeping dragon whenever poked.

     The doctors do like to poke at my vertigo. They make me follow their pens in all directions, turning my head or my eyes or my head and my eyes. One day in particular, I spend an hour in a chair, which saps my energy, and then the doctors come and I follow their pens around the room. When they leave I return to the bed, and immediately start to vomit. I quickly learn that’s what happens after I expend energy. Living with the vertigo, even for a few days, has me immune to the fear of vomiting.

     When a patient vomits the nurses seem to go quiet, invisible, almost ghost-like. They respect our privacy even as they invade it.

* * *

When visitors arrive, there are many awkward pauses. No one really knows what to say, once they hear my story. They might want to be sympathetic, but I don’t look pathetic or act pathetic. Many who visit seem to expect to share in my misery. When they don’t spot misery, they’re at a loss. I’m too much a clean state to feel miserable. I’m too much a clean slate to feel anything; but like a sociopath blending in, I pretend.

     Also, they are fearful. I was once a vibrant, active, fast-paced woman. Now, I represent their own fragility, if not mortality. And maybe a bit of guilt, at the relief it wasn’t them.

     Ill people spend surprisingly costly amounts of time ensuring others are all right. As our own health spirals out of control, it is their very foundation that spirals with it. Equilibrium is upset when someone can no longer be to you what they once were. Just as in mourning death we mourn our own roles with the dead, in facing illness we mourn a life we shared together, in whatever capacity. I see, in every visitor’s eyes, an adjustment from the certainty that ‘it can’t be.’ For me it already is, putting me a step ahead. My limitations, my interpretation of them, and my ability to face them, is knowledge I can only impart, like playing telephone, and all they really want, when you get down to it, is for things to go back to the way they were. We are all too tight to handle elastic tragedies.

* * *

If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911;
I am neither steel nor glass.

I hear your voice forming words I wish I could say
And see your legs doing things I wish mine could do.
Your face is memory of a time
when I took you for granted.
But I think you’re only living, anyway,
when you’re taking life for granted.
Regardless,
these legs you once called unctuous
cannot match you in step.

I don’t have the energy to prop you up.
I don’t have the heart to let you down.

* * *

I am already pushing up against stringent limits. If I sit in the chair, it has to be less than an hour, or else I set off vertigo. When I walk, I have to turn to the left, or I will set off vertigo. If I talk too much, or even listen too much, I need to nap. Lying on my left side is never permissible. And so on.

     My head is forever and always tipped to the left, and it makes me queasy to correct it. Sometimes they set it straight in therapy and it sets off new waves of nausea.

     When I sleep, I always wake up with a start. I don’t remember dreaming, but I’m sure they aren’t nightmares. It is a swimming to surface, a gasp of oxygen denied. Every time I wake in this way, heart pounding and moment of adjustment, I feel I push a reset button. It is strangely restorative to know my body is relearning how to wake up, as it relearns everything else.

     Though my walking is slow, I am now able to shuffle to the bathroom with assistance. It is wonderfully liberating to experience this modicum of natural life. Though it is still astonishing that my right arm is untrainable. It dangles by me, not a care in the world; its ringer is off to anyone who calls.

     I am able to move it in wide bursts, though not even close to dextrous. Often when I cough or vomit, habitually throwing up my right arm, I smack myself in the face with a floppy hand. I find this hilarious. And I can’t imagine anyone not finding it hilarious. When I tell my friends, I can tell how clearly they understand me by how much or how little they laugh.

     Though turning my head or looking around is vomit-inducing, and though walking is a chore, there is one thing I refuse to let lapse: my handwriting. I am barely able to hold a cup, but I am hell-bent on holding a pen. An occupational therapist, who I’ve not seen before, visits to talk pens and paper. She asks me to attempt a sentence so I open my new journal. This will be my seventy-second spiral notebook since I began at age 14. My name is Michelle, I write. I am very hungry. The OT thinks this is hilarious, and I’m not sure why. I’ve had nothing but applesauce for days. I’m astonished that I can’t get smaller than two lines at a time. But she tells me to practice letters across the page, and I do. Anyone who visits around this time will see me writing the alphabet over and over again.

     I have trouble, also, stopping at the end of the page. A patch is on my left eye, and the end of the page is on my right side, but I overshoot it every time. I just can’t see where it stops and I glide off the page on every row.

* * *

After this the stroke doctors come in again, and say it’s nice to see you. I say, nice to almost see you! They laugh and I laugh. I don’t see the point in crying.

* * *

People all over are saying how strong I am, and if anyone can pull through, it’s me. How do they know this? Some of these people barely know me. Are these platitudes? What is it about me that’s so particularly strong?

     I’m not crying non-stop; but lack of crying isn’t strength. You cry, or you don’t. You’re still getting better, either way. Can you really tell me with a straight face that if you cry more, self-pity more, your rate of healing decreases?

     Either way, this puts an undue pressure on me while I sort myself out. I’m not sure I owe any of these well-wishers anything; and yet their suppositions of me in fact presuppose that I do.

     I want to be the person everyone thinks I am, I tell them. I’m surprised, they say, that you think you have to be a certain kind of person. But what if I let all these well-wishers down, I say. The ones who tell me I am strong, brave, that I will “beat it?” What does this daily ritual of vomit and therapy belts have to do with being strong or brave? They say, The only way you could let them down is by giving up – and that’s not going to happen. Well, they’re right about that, at least.

* * *

If it’s about grit,
I got this.
If it’s about will(power):
in spades.

If it’s about generosity, destiny, sensitivity, astrology, botany, or philosophy
my colors are flying.

Call me all the pretty names
Smile and look up
But it’s not about any of these things.

It’s about luck, brother
Pinball
and the open space between the wings
like women’s legs, in wait for the code.

Save your grit for your walk home.

Because for now
The most we can do
is tilt the machine with our weary bones
Keep the ball in play
until luck runs out:
Inevitable
no matter how many times we play.

* * *

When day comes, the dizziness begins again. It’s as if I have a hangover every morning. I develop the habit of opening my eyes with several blinks through my fingers, as if watching a horror movie. As they adjust to the light, I see the world is still spinning, and hope at that first waking moment is just a little bit lost.

     My mother visits, and brings me supplies in the form of several extra pens, pudding, and teddy graham crackers. Also, lollipops, because I wake up in the night with a dry, scratchy cough. Never does this happen by day, but then neither do my eyes see perfectly by day. My body quite literally does not know which end is up. But when I wake at night I feel the most safe. It is quiet, and the dark hides the bright patterns (is that why my eyes feel better?). I can eat pudding and suck on lollipops and write in my journal. And if I’m tired tomorrow, I can nap as long as I please. It is an ironic, pleasant sort of limbo.

     I am writing a lot, and my handwriting is getting better. It’s ironic that I can’t in the least read what I’ve written. What would we write, if we knew we couldn’t read it over again? What secrets would we share, knowing posterity would swallow it whole?

One day I am in my room alone and the alarm bell goes off through the facility. A code blue is announced, and I have no idea what this is. I squint at my phone, trying to talk into it and focus on the words to decipher the meaning. Active shooter? Abduction? Fire?

     A code blue, my phone tells me, is just like a code red. Which could apparently mean anything at all. Perhaps someone has heart failure, and perhaps we’re all going to die from an explosion, and anything in between. I start to panic. This is the first time it’s actually mattered to me that I can’t walk. The reality hits me that without mobility, I am a sitting duck for any and all emergencies. Never before had I thought about how fleeing requires speed.

     I hear no running or commotion outside, but the doors are thick, and I am at the end of the hall. I begin making plans for how I would escape if I had to. I could, I think, either propel myself into the wheelchair, or plop onto the floor and drag myself, a la Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, to the window. From there, I would require great arm strength but it might be possible to pull up on the windowsill. Once there I would have to break the window, and it would certainly be thick. I frantically scan the room looking for something both strong and light. If I stay in this wheelchair, I think, for longer than a few weeks, I’m going to have to start working out like the superhero Oracle, who was once Batgirl, and reformed her powers. I am going to be the strongest and most able wheelchair rider this side of – well, this side of mortality.

     I am torn between the necessity of saving my life, and the probability of actually needing to. If I set myself by the window, I’ll have to get into the wheelchair, which I’m repeatedly told takes the help of two people. What if I fall, and there is no emergency other than what I create for myself?

     My hesitation pays off this time: the code blue is called off after what seems like hours, but was probably just minutes. I never find out what happens, but I’m left with the now-familiar cognitive dissonance of two thoughts. One, the panic of sudden awareness of disability. And two, the certainty that I can take care of myself, despite and through such a disability. Never mind that I probably wouldn’t have been able to break the window, had I needed to. The point is that I would die trying. If I’m going to die anyway, I’m going to die trying. That, I am learning, will be my common thread no matter when is my time to leave my life.

* * *

In a therapy session, I sit before a therapist and a computer to list goals for my therapy. What are things I’d like to do again? Without hesitation, the first word out of my mouth is ‘dance.’ I want to dance. If I can walk, that doesn’t necessarily mean I can dance. I never took lessons in ballroom or salsa, but I can kick it at a dance club, and regularly did so. I miss that freedom of movement. Dancing to music is near-involuntary: your body moves before you actually tell it what to do. These days, all I do is tell my body what to do. Sometimes it obeys; sometimes it snubs. My day is full of tasks I can no longer perform without thinking. Start with your left foot. Lock your wheelchair. Listen carefully to words, so you can understand them. Sit forward to pull up your pants. There is no room for the free body. Dance is number one. I can barely see, but I watch people dancing on television. It is a fantasy show, a science fiction tale.

* * *

Therapists remind me that the nervous system is the back-up, the parachute, the failsafe for overload. If, for example, someone overworks at the gym, she comes home and is exhausted. But when I overload, there is no nervous system to fall back on. When I am done, I am done: there is simply nothing more in the tank. I know when this happens; I know, and I stop. It’s because of this careful attention to my body, and willingness to admit its limits, that I’m allowed to go home.

     After a month, before I can go home, my close family must undergo basic therapy training, on how best to spot me, and help me up if I fall.  My husband learns how to put a hand near my back – not actually on my back – and keep the other hand fluid in front of me, to brace my balance. But all without touching me – I have to do the work myself. Then I get down on the ground the way I would fall. This is painful for me because vertigo is worse when I am prone. He learns to first check if I’ve hit my head or body, then help me up in a particular way – on my side first. Basically you go up the way you went down.

     Our mothers train, but don’t live close by. Who else? My ten year old son is big for his age; he could hold me up. He comes to train with my mom one afternoon.

     First he learns the hand placement, and then I pretend to fall again and they each help me up. But you’re not going to fall, they assure me again. It is, regardless, bittersweet to watch my son help me walk. I didn’t think he’d have to do this for another forty years, and I mourn my health for his sake. I am not angry, embarrassed, or looking to blame. I just flat-out feel sorry for my son.

     But all the same, he charms the therapists with his manners and soft kindness. My son has always been an independent boy and, compared to his siblings, relatively unaffectionate. Now, though, he takes my hand often, asks after me, and maintains a gentle touch through the therapy training. When I express sadness over his having to experience this, he puts up his hand and says, I know the circumstances. Even then he seems older than his ten years. I didn’t want to force him into this maturity.

     I’m told, perhaps as fake comfort, that it will build his confidence, and that he will benefit from seeing me work through something hard and long. Perhaps that is true. Surely already, in the last month, he’s seen great progress in me. No more tubes, no more green sponges in cups. I feel proud, that I am walking. I hope he sees that in my face, and puts it in his heart.

* * *

I was never an artist; I was so much not an artist that my family openly mocked my drawing or painting skills. I’m probably still not much of an artist; but I’m compulsively drawing everything around me. The food I eat, the food I order and can’t eat. They strange looking lamp, myself with a patch over my eye. The remote control, the lotion on my tray. I can’t stop. I see pictures when I’m too tired to see words. Me without words is uncharted territory indeed. I wonder if I will be a better artist after this – or more of a visual learner. I’ve never cared about capturing images with images before; usually I just describe them, and that’s always been enough. Now, words lack a dimension. Only images can fill it.

     What I am, now, though, is ambidextrous. I can write quite well with my left hand, thank you very much. I remember well the grinding effort it takes to use the non-dominant hand. Now, it’s just a little harder. But no grinding, and much less effort. It’s not a bad superpower, but I admit I was hoping for something a little grander. All the same, it scares people when I tell them. They can’t understand how my brain has changed, but I feel it from the inside. Nothing grinds because there is no noise. I work at very little, because very little matters.

* * *

Roles flip now: the kids put me to bed instead of vice versa. We eat dinner, then they spot me for ablutions and I’m in bed by about 8 each night. So often I’m in the bedroom alone at first, queasy and self-pitying, and I’m so happy when they march in to say goodnight.

     Though all around me cater to my needs, my family still needs me, even as a motionless figurehead. I somehow remember the library card numbers; I give the children slow, careful advice from my bed. When they come to me I can focus on them without distraction, and it is a gift. They do not compete with grocery lists, work worries, family drama, or unpaid bills. It is them and it is me; all else is a welcome black hole.

     It is strangely comforting to be needed. My husband said something like this, didn’t he, while I was in the ICU – something like, remember, you have four people at home who really need you. It sounded like, don’t give up. It sounded like, don’t die. Certainly it sounded like, don’t leave us.

     I’m trying.

* * *

When I close my eyes and the world spins, I have conversations with my grandfather, who has been dead for almost twenty years. I sit on his lap, my flat white sandals hanging off the side of the burgundy chair that leans back.

     Tell me about your love life, he says. Like he always says.

     No, I say, I want to tell you about my stroke.

     He pauses. Mikki, he says, we’ve talked about this. I’m a fatalist.

     I know, I say.

     In the war, he says, this guy had his arm shot almost clean off, and you know what he said? I’m so glad I have an arm.

     So this is about gratitude, I say. I’m disappointed.

     No, he says. This is about how if you haven’t had knocks, you’re not living well.

     But a stroke is a really hard knock, Pops.

     I know, Mikki. But then you’ll live really damn well.

He’s right.

Michelle Cristiani teaches Reading and Writing at Portland Community College in Portland, OR. Recent publications include Awakenings Review 2017 and Oregon Poetry Association’s 2015 spring awards for experimental poetry and emerging poet. Michelle earned her doctorate in anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 2003. She is working on a memoir/ethnography of rehabilitation for traumatic brain injury. Find Michelle on twitter with @mikkicristiani.

Judge: Molly Gloss is a novelist and short story writer whose novels include The Jump-Off Creek,The Hearts of Horses, and Falling from Horses. She has received, among other honors, an Oregon Book Award, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, the PEN West Fiction Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. Her work often concerns the landscape, literature, mythology, and life of the American West.