Between Memory and Oblivion

People are destroying my home today. They’ve brought heavy machinery, handheld tools, nails, saws, and hammers. The floors will crumble to dust, and the machines will screech through the halls. As I go room to room, making sure nothing is left on the floor, a box pokes out from the closet in my office. I should have tossed it. I crouch, rifle through it, and find a journal buried at the bottom.

My stomach twists. I push the journal away as if it’s poison, and then, despite myself, I open it. Ink floods the pages from a time I tried to bury. I read the whole thing, reliving the torment of trauma. Maybe, as the old is torn away around me, I can finally take back what I’ve always wanted: to be the author of a story I only possess in fragments.

The journal opens in my lap, and my chest feels cracked open. It begins with the day, a year and a half ago, when I was cooking in our kitchen. I am always cooking. Standing at the counter, chopping vegetables, pairing flavors, building plates for the people I love, and that freedom steadies me. In the kitchen, the Myositis, the stress, the calendar of doctor appointments fade into the hiss of sautéed food. But that evening, life reminded me in one of my favorite places that I am still delicate.

How can I write about what I cannot remember? I collect trauma like a book series. The My Little Traumas volumes tell stories of survival so that everyone around me can experience them firsthand. I can’t accept a new wound without closing the last volume. I don’t remember the fall or the first days after, but fracture lines run deep; when doubt creeps in, I run my fingers over my scalp and find the metal plates they installed.

I do not remember the fall. Only the stories others told me. My muscles no longer had the strength to keep up with the motion. Preparing meals requires mobility, such as turning, lifting, and multitasking. Those quick instincts are why I loved the space. I don’t remember tripping. I know that my muscles no longer have the strength to keep up with the motion. Our kitchen floor is cold tile with divots of grout. My body went from standing to slamming against that tile; the left side of my head hit first. All within seconds. I don’t remember those seconds.

What follows is a story told to me as if I were a reader and not the protagonist. Shouldn’t I have written it? Shouldn’t I remember? My husband called paramedics. I’ve been in ambulances before; I don’t recall this one. I don’t know, lying against white tile, now painted red with my blood. I don’t know what the panic was, because I wasn’t there. It was as if I were someone else.

I don’t remember the CT scan that revealed an epidural hemorrhage. I didn’t know my head had struck the tile so hard that my skull was now fractured, splintered, damaged, and I was bleeding into the dura. I don’t remember the chaos I caused entering the ER, the faces, or the heartbreak I instilled.

At the University Hospital, they carted me into an operating room. I was unconscious. I was still bleeding inside; hair was shaved away because surgeons cannot crack open a skull like a coconut with hair in the way. They cut into the left side of my skull, stopped the bleeding, and wired me back together.

My skull, fractured by tile, got a wire mesh wrapped over it like a delicate gift someone tried to save too late. The round bone removed was placed back into its slot and secured with metal plates and screws.

Many times, when I worried I was losing my mind from memory loss, I thought they hadn’t put me back together correctly. Even with the best neurosurgeon in the state, I suspected he’d left a piece out. Sometimes it feels like parts of me are still scattered across the places I visited: the kitchen, the first ambulance, the ER, the helicopter, the operating room. All of these pieces of me were left behind.

In the journal, I find myself again in the ICU, trying to tape back together what the fall shattered. Like a madwoman, I recited stories lodged in my memory, only to have my husband or mother interrupt: “That’s not how it happened,” or “No, they never visited you.” My remembered moments twisted and slipped through a tangled web. I was left sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming the same questions: What happened to me? What meaning does remembering hold? Why was I so desperate to remember this tragedy?

For months into a year, the journal charts me being held hostage by the absence of memory and the grief of losing who I was. I dreaded memories crashing back unannounced. I lived on a narrow beam between memory and oblivion. Every helicopter overhead had the potential to unlock something; months later, when I heard blades slice the air, I would stop, close my eyes, and wait for the violence of that sound to ignite a crumb of recall. Nothing came but only grief, a paradox trapped inside me. The story was mine, the event was mine, but without the memory I couldn’t hold it, couldn’t write it, and couldn’t let go of the ache for what I never had. It felt like awaiting a dreadful diagnosis: the fear that one day it would finally crash down.

After that first entry, the pages curled at their ends like petals hiding from the sun, soaked by my tears. I wrote in the shadows of night when I wasn’t being watched because my caretakers didn’t need another task to worry over. I came home with gauze wrapped around my head, legs shaking from vertigo, paralyzed by an inability to move forward. I grieved myself: the person I was and everything that escaped me.

Two weeks after the surgery, I had a follow-up with the man who took a saw to my skull. I asked about him on the drive; my mother told me, “You know him, he visited every day in the ICU.” I did not remember. I expected that when he opened the door, memory would sweep me back, but I remembered nothing. He pulled staples from my scalp. Staples, the way they forced me back together. He told me I was healing, that I could even hit my head again without worry because the metal would protect me. His words offered a small comfort as my mother and husband sat beside me, their spines stiff and their panic.

I kept writing at night. I was helpless for weeks and for many months after. Walking felt like an earthquake; equilibrium eluded me. The surgeon’s offhand “Go ahead and fall again, you’ll be fine” inflamed a new panic: each step could unknowingly lead to my downfall. I felt like a renter in a stranger’s body. I had half a head of hair, a circular incision on top of my skull, and a scalp stained yellow from iodine. I couldn’t wash too hard, as it risked infection. I couldn’t walk without support. I returned to work, but nighttime stalked me, where grief could touch me.

Trauma forced me into a new identity. I didn’t ask to be the girl with a fractured skull, with no balance, with no memory, and no clear path forward. I read this journal now, over a year old, and it hurts her all over again. I remember the burden, the panic, the loss. I never got to say goodbye to her; I never got to apologize for the hurt because I never gained the memory to do so.

Today, as the men tore away my floors, I stood on the sidelines and watched. I had cooked in that kitchen all week. I watched them bring a tool that resembled a forklift; they shoved it under the tile and pried up the floor. I acknowledged how I once longed to remember the fury I carried for months and the grueling work I did to lift myself out of loss and panic. I remembered the people who loved me and stayed by my side through the metamorphosis. I fought every step. I fought myself in denial of becoming someone new. I grieved for what felt like an eternity. I felt beyond repair. I had no will to repair, to stand tall, to live. I held space for it all as I stood in my kitchen watching people destroy my home to make room for something new.

I watch a tile crack and split into pieces. I grin. Anything that can fracture me can also be broken.