“Actually, It’s love. I’m in love with her, okay? If you’re looking for the word that means caring about someone beyond all rationality and wanting them to have everything they want no matter how much it destroys you, it’s love. And when you love someone you just, you…you don’t stop, ever. Even when people roll their eyes, and call you crazy. Even then. Especially then. You just– you don’t give up. Because if I could just give up…if I could just, you know, take the whole world’s advice and– and move on and find someone else, that wouldn’t be love. That would be… that would be some other disposable thing that is not worth fighting for. But I– that is not what this is.” – T.M.

Having lived 17 years before my brain injury, I’d say I was fairly well adapted to that life….here I am, near 16 years later, and I am fairly well adapted to a disabled life.

I love my family very dearly and my old friends, but there are many times, when with them, it is as if they are seeing me through a foggy window….still remembering the old me as I was, but seeing and experiencing the new me as I am.

Being a keen observer of the human condition, I pick up on nonverbal signals, these tiny cues. They don’t yet know how to act around me and keep waiting for me to transform back into what I was before I was changed by pain.

I understand the dilemma and the yearning…they miss their son, their brother, their friend. I miss him less and less everyday. The naive, though brilliant, little punk I was… Ha!

I realize that the main reason I even go out is to distract from the physical pain. Even now, 4:10am, my hand is a throbbing mass of unbridled tension. It keeps a guy up at night.

I write this for understanding, so others can see behind the scenes, can gain a glimpse of what I live through everyday. So they can realize that I am happy to be alive, even if in pain. Every day is a gift, every moment, every now.

The struggles we face in life come down to a few choices. Yeah, I could easily have become an addict. After my accident I was on massive amounts of opioids (Vicodin, Percocet, Ocycontin, Morphine, etc etc). I made a choice, around 21 or 22, that I was not going to become dependent on these drugs. I weened myself off and only take pain medication, now, when I am in extreme pain. Yeah, my pain tolerance is much higher, but pain is pain. It sucks!

Bonjour et c’est la vie!

Brain Injured Brilliance

To fall in love with a mystery

A change in acts of transparency 

To more clandestine arts

Worth both more and less 

Lost if tarries too long

Plagued with indifference or want of more

Only found that none are more

Just different degrees of normalcy

Boring if not bland. Ignorance paramount 

Taking the unknown brilliance to out of reach 

Paramour and more

So many are out of league, given chance

squandered  for superficial want, their loss.

Time not lost on bitchy want

Too much life, too much joy

If one wizens, they may see 

A fuck he gives not one way or the other 

His light will shine, will flourish the same.

World Walkers

Publicly alone, life lived alone, self censorship when expression made brings

Stifled madness. Internalized hell brought to fore with societal disregard

Seeking to wake, to make known the plight of those without voice

Of those trapped in collective mind, unable to experience the real

Hope remains, fleeting among disillusioned, burgeoning 

In the walkers of worlds…those bright lights of thought, 

Of dreams made reality. Here and gone at random 

Granted taken when near, wisdom renowned o’er the ages

One mind, universal pull, tapped at the source.

Chance 

Warped wave messaging 

“What the fuck is this?!?”

Notices reality coil, “hmm it must be!”

Attraction negated years past, seems brought 

Forth to realization, thus…

Shrugs and on he moves

Mandela Effect 

What is real beyond a familial connection

Where to go, what to do, who to be???

Pond crossing possibilities, southern minded by any means 

Realities shifting before awe filled eyes

Going with change, adapting to shifting skies

Minds seeing one way, remembering another, multiverse bearings 

“What the fuck is going on?!?”

Subconscious screams in slumber 

Twisting, striking dreams, damning the netherscape 

Awareness is reality adapting, though holding memory of yore

Suicide Note

Take these moments of clarity, 

Those lucid thought parabolas 

Whisper growth in words found warring with the world 

Glow orb hanging lonely loftwards 

Attempting to draw the eyes the hearts the waters

No ear, no heart, no eye, no water to notice 

World without moon life is no life.