Remote Control

After the accident, I was different. I sensed it from the very start, but as is often the case, I suppressed this new knowledge. Didn’t know what to do with it. Easier to focus on what was going on around me. The major part of which was that my life had radically changed since my fall.

My fall went way beyond whatever calamity occurred at the top of the stairs on that pivotal day. The stairs in question dog-legged around and once more around so that they were pointing in entirely the opposite direction to my downward travel. I must’ve hit the brick wall as the steps began to first angle around. I could have broken my neck. Instead I did a humpty dumpty, but the people in the hospital put me back together again. Mostly they did. Only there was something missing and in that hole I found something that seemed like a gift. Now though, I don’t see it that way. Just because I found it doesn’t mean it was meant for me. We’re arrogant magpies at the best of times.

The fall itself was life changing. I was sluggish and the doctors told me this may always be the case. I understood that well enough and this caused my frustration to build. I was typing in my mind but the cursor blinked and blinked. Then maybe the words would come. Maybe not. And when they did, I wasn’t always sure they were the words I’d typed.

This was also my fall from grace – which is funny (but no one is laughing at this particular joke) because my wife’s name was Grace. The fall seemed to set in motion a state of affairs that cast me adrift from myself and the life I had built from nothing and invested myself so totally in. I think we all do that to some extent or another. Go hard, or go home. Half measures never stick and you never win a damn thing unless you mean to. Luck is only ever made. Never gifted. There I go with the gifts again. Looking them in the mouth and finding the booby trap or a band of warriors intent on destroying the status quo from the inside out.

In my brain-smashed state of confusion, Grace visited me. Those visits were mechanical. An obligation fulfilled. I knew that from the start. I’d changed, but that wasn’t the only change. There was a distance between us. I’d eventually ask myself whether that distance had always been there. We get good at ignoring these things. Faking it so maybe we’ll make it. Ignore it and it will go away. Pretend that everything is OK and you might just attract enough positive energy to make it so. Either that or you wear a happy mask to hide the sadness. Just another clown performing for the punters. Putting on a brave face to save everyone from the depression of reality. You most of all.

I asked after the kids. She hadn’t brought them and initially I got that. I was a mess. I wouldn’t have wanted to see me. I really didn’t want to see me. I avoided the bathroom mirror and I loathed my own voice. I sounded slow and stupid. This new version of me wasn’t sparking and my misfiring shamed me. This was the previous me at seventy five percent at best. I doubted I was much over fifty if I was honest.

And I saw this in Grace’s eyes. Or rather, I didn’t see much of anything in her eyes. She looked right through me as though I had become irrelevant, and right there in the hospital I was. I was no use to anyone.

Forty two and I damaged my brain by falling down the stairs. What a shitty story arc! I began fearing the prospect of seeing my own children after Grace’s initial visits. How could I be their hero? In this state there was a chance they’d be wiping food off my chin and helping me got to the loo. What kind of life was that?

Was this depression? Of course it was. That and grief. I was grieving the life I had taken for granted and I was lamenting the loss of my health. The single most important thing in our lives is our ability to live. We need good health to do that. There was more to it though and I avoided those deeper layers. I did what I was best at and I went through the motions and did my best not to make a bad situation worse. I asked after the kids, but I didn’t push it with Grace. I sensed that she was on the top step of a set of stairs of her own and I couldn’t afford for her to fall as well. From my hospital bed I had no way of holding her hand and preventing that descent. I tried, but my attempts were clumsy. She didn’t even hold my hand as I lay there wondering what the future held.

Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you make your move. Rock bottom can be an elusive destination. We may think we’re there, but life hasn’t finished with us yet and there is further down to go.

When I was discharged from the hospital I felt far from ready. I blamed under funding. My stay had been good, but I needed longer. That was my prognosis and sod what the doctors told me. I wasn’t going to be fine. My brain was still out of whack. A radio missing an aerial. So much white noise. I couldn’t think straight and it hurt to make things stick. This made for slow progress and I got annoyed with myself with every twist and turn of daily life.

Getting home from the hospital was an adventure I was not ready for. My mobile phone was dead. I’d not used it in the hospital. I stared at the blank screen dumbly. When I caught my reflection in the useless dark glass I quickly pocketed it. That was a ghost I was not ready to confront.

Grace was not there to pick me up. The discharge had surprised me, so how could she know? She’d be at work so I decided to make my own way home. I had notions of surprising her and the kids. Convinced myself that it would be a happy reunion and a significant step forward in my rehabilitation. A reset that would bring with it the familiarity of normality.

As the cold air hit me so did reality. I stood to one side of the hustle and bustle of the A&E entrance and I panicked. An invisible and inexplicable fear assailed me and I had to stumble to a quieter spot to breath again. Realising that the spasming of my chest was as a result of silent yet ferocious tears. I leant against the wall and did not know what to do. I didn’t want to be here, but I did not have the wherewithal to find the safety of my home. Usually I would drive. I had no car to hand. It would be sat on the driveway outside my house. With all my will I wished my car was in the car park that I could see signs for. Even then, the prospect of heading down that way and searching amongst all those vehicles was too much.

Too much.

It was all too much. I pushed myself from the wall and lumbered away. I needed to move away from the noise and commotion. I walked in a daze and when I heard the air brakes of a bus as it pulled to a stop at the kerbside I realised I couldn’t bring myself to clamber on board. That was not for me. Neither was a taxi or an Uber. The thought of the enclosed space was so restricting. A metal coffin with an unwanted presence in the driver’s seat.

At least I kept walking. Eventually hearing the muttering voice that was my own. Nature. I was telling myself that I’d been disconnected from the real world and what I needed was to be in nature. This would ground me. I would feel OK once I was away from the bricks and concrete and the people who were almost as lost as me as they went about lives devoid of meaning. That was the gist of it. In the fog of my labouring and slow mind anyway. Nature and then home.

Five miles later, I turned the corner into the street where my home sits nestled in amongst cloned versions of itself. Walking through the park helped a little but I had no urge to sit a while on a bench and take the trees and grass in. A squirrel stopped on the path and observed me. I loathed it for doing so. I didn’t want to be seen out in public. Not like this. That squirrel dispelled any thoughts of nature. All I wanted was the refuge of my own home.

Having turned the corner, I stopped. This was a bad idea. The thought hit me like a sledge hammer. I knew it was right but I could not link it to any train of thinking. It just stood there and challenged me. Don’t do this. I had this awful knot of dread in my stomach. It didn’t sit right and I swore it wriggled. A treacherous and malignant thing that spoke to me of my oncoming demise via a dread discomfort. Now I had a link. To a small cardboard box that sat gathering dust on my desk. A box I was supposed to shit in so I could be screened for bowel cancer. Another animal of fear and shame guarding that box and threatening to nip me if I ever complied with the instructions. Hemmed in by fear, the scope for my living herded into tighter and tighter enclosures until here I was. Afraid of my own home.

The only reason for moving forward was that I had nowhere else to go. Hobson’s choice. The all too common cause of what it is we do. There’s nothing else for it.

I was through the door of my home before I knew it. Later I would understand why time had taken on a strange quality that further detached me from my surroundings. Something was missing between my standing at the street corner and finding myself in the hallway of my house. I put it down to a combination of my meds and the usual autopilot that fails to record the mundanity of our lives. Saving room in our memories for what counts. My memory accordingly empty of anything that counted.

That feeling of detachment doubled down once I was home. The familiarity of my surroundings was alien to me. And in that alienation I read the situation. Felt the ghosts of a family that were no longer there. I strode into the kitchen suddenly filled with an energy that came from nowhere. I don’t know why I went to the kitchen first. A safe option with little to say to me. It was neat, tidy and clean. Not even a used mug by the sink. I walked over to check the bowl in any case, knowing that it would be empty and dry.

Next, the living room. There would usually be evidence of the kids here. Toys. Objects they had discovered. A half-eaten pack of sweets. Crumbs. The same neatness greeted me; nothing to see here. I went to the stairs and paused. Staring at the blank wall that had change my life irrevocably. Expecting to see damage or at least a smear of blood. The wall was unaffected and uncaring. I disliked it for its indifference.

Climbing the stairs was hard. My legs weren’t my own. I became angry and there I was again. Displaced in an instant. Standing at an open wardrobe door. Confused at what I was seeing, or rather what I wasn’t seeing. It’s the absences that get us. They hit hard. Where there should have been Grace’s dresses, there were naked coat hangers. All that was left were the bare bones where once there had been the meat of life.

Then I was in the kid’s bedrooms. That same neat appearance and beyond it an emptiness that accorded with the feeling I’d had when I entered the house. They were gone and my heart had followed them. Lost to the four winds came the thought as I sat heavily on the bed.

For the next few days I flitted from room to room. When I was thirsty I drank. Never was there an empty glass by the sink or the drainer. Always, it sat awaiting me in the usual cupboard. A cupboard that was not bare, but somehow managed to mock me with absence all the same. Glassware is strange when all you have is strange to bring to it. The reflections flickered and whispered to me, but I could not tell what it was that was being said.

I think I slept. There is so much that escaped me. There was nothing for me here and my confusion reigned for longer than I care to remember. All I had were ghosts and so I haunted the place I had once called home.

Eventually, I’d trod enough of a rut to wake up to this tortured existence of mine. I was sitting on one of the kid’s beds. I’d been crying because I could not summon his face in my mind’s eye. I’d then tried for my daughter’s and finally Grace’s. That was when I realised there were no photos of any of us remaining in the house. There was a betrayal in that theft of memory and in that betrayal was an unfathomable sorrow. I cried for a long time and discovered there was a limit to how long and how far you can take crying. I hit a painful drought and told myself I could not go on like this.

Thinking about the future. A future I desired where Grace and the kids featured, I cast myself forward. Wishing myself away from my present circumstances. The world blurred around me and every time I slowed down all I saw was a life devoid of Grace. Never a glimpse of the kids. Nothing to hold onto. There was nothing to look forward to.

When I came back to myself I at last understood that I was in an altered state. I’d had a suspicion, but had dismissed it as madness. Feared that I was mad as a result of the injury to my head. I had to test it now though. I wanted to know. We always have to know.

My intent was to have a drink of water. Then I was there. At the sink. The glass was full. I drank half of the contents and then laughed mirthlessly as I observed the optimistic glass half full. I went forward. Checked the sink and then the cupboard. The dry glass was there. Went back. The glass was there and for all intents and purposes it was the same glass. Only… I was thirsty. Forward. Glass sitting there inviting me to challenge it. And my thirst was gone.

I paused. Dwelt in that moment and found it frightening. Behind what I could see was an ominous emptiness. A threat of a nothingness that was forever hungry. And again, I heard that whispering. Only now it was louder and there was something in it that I recognised. Something that would undo me when I heard it and understood what it was saying. Quickly I released myself from that state and walked to the front door of a place that was once my home and now was only a prison. I stared at the blank face of my front door and knew I would not open it. That I could not face the world outside. If there was nothing for me here, how could there be anything for me out there?

As I turned my back on that door, I found I was at the foot of the stairs. That was when I knew why I had this unwanted gift. There was something here that I had to see. I was here to confront a truth. To rewind and revisit the scene of my accident. This was the scene of the crime. This when it all changed.

I don’t know if I willed it to happen. One second I was at the foot of the stairs, the next I was at the top of them. And there was that whisper. I could feel breath on my ear and the voice that whispered was unmistakeable. The words froze me in place. But the stairs beckoned me. The world moving under my feet. Grace behind me. The words. Then, in the next instant. Change. Monumental and cataclysmic change.

I can rewind. I can pause. And I can fast-forward. I can take back what happened. But I can’t change a damn thing. I’m a passenger and none of it is real because it’s all already happened.

And so I play it over and over again and now I hear the whisper loud and clear and I understand the maddening truth of it. Understand it only too well as I descend into a rock bottom madness as I replay these scenes again and again. Coming undone a piece at a time but knowing it will never end. It will never be over. Stuck in an infinite loop that I should never pause. There’s something waiting for me when I pause and it’s ever so hungry.