living

He is not going to die. He eases himself up in the hospital bed with his good arm. The pillow is askew, but he heaves himself up onto it anyway. Tomorrow they will move him into a ward for the brain-injured. So many other instructions and information has flowed through his brain as if it were a colander, but this little gem has stuck. He has struck gold. He will be moved out of the private room with its television and its curtain and its hydrolic chair and a constant parade of visitors. He will not die, and now he must go about the arduous task of living.

Brain-injury unit. He thinks of creatures from a horror movie, locked wards with drooling, spitting, moaning half-humans clamouring for release. He wipes a string of spittal from his own chin and he is different. he is not like that, like them. He is the same inside. He is the person he was the day before the fall only peices of him have melted away and he must struggle to navigate his way through the maze of thoughts that go nowhere, losing energy down some corridor or another, turning back, trying to forge a new path towards that word or that memory or that idea.