Walking Straight

I want to walk straight. Everyone around me has walked straight their entire lives, they don't deviate from their paths, to walk forward is second nature to breathing, there is no regression, there are no setbacks. Going forward is the default, and to deviate is aberrant. You sleep 8 hours. You go to work for 8 hours. Your lunch isn't paid. You come home and mess around for 4 hours. And then you do it again. Sleep, work, free time. It's straight line. It's stable. Your line never curves or bends, the only thing that doesn't follow this pattern are the folds in your brain.

I have folds in my brain too. They're misshapen, in comparison. Something is deeply wrong with them. Others can tell, through my transparent skull, that there's some problem in there. Maybe they can tell me what, but they can certainly never tell me what I should do about it. Brain surgery couldn't fix it, of course. Not in the way that I'd want. You hear tell of people who get brain surgery becoming different. Less interesting. More aggressive. A scalpel turns your friend into a stranger. I don't need a scalpel to do that, my brain turns friends into strangers with nothing but time. Time heals all wounds, you know. It doesn't. Time makes you blind to the wounds, but you'll never be free of them. Invisible scars across your frontal cortex causing pain where it shouldn't be, the scar tissue taking up important centres of your brain. Your memories replaced by fibrous tissue.

Even through my collagen memory, I never stop feeling the phantom pains, of a wound that was never there in a way that I could understand pushing its way back to the front of my head. The pain is hidden behind receptors, leaking out pus and blood across my body, leaving scars that disgust others, leaving me to clean what I don't remember.

Do you remember your childhood? You walk straight. Of course you do. There were no deviations in your path to make you forget, one step into a ditch sinking you into a pool of forgetfulness.

On my rocky, diagonal path, I remember nothing. I can't. The same processes that scarred my brain have also zeroed out whatever information was left there. I get told about things that I have to accept happened, because to say that I don't remember, to say that it didn't happen to me, would be seen as denial. Denial is bad. Everything ever has happened to me, and yet I remember nothing. New scars form daily. They rip open but I learn nothing from what's inside. My myocardium holds nothing. It barely pumps blood.

I want to walk straight. I want to correct myself. I want to be right, I want to be normal, I want to be me. I don't know who that is, though. Once upon a time, I think I was myself. I don't remember it, now, but I look back at things I have said, and the ways that I've felt in the past, and I realize that somewhere, deep inside, I used to exist. Others remember me, they remember what I used to be. I don't. I don't know if what I am now is even worth the time, the effort, of others who remember someone wildly different. I try to reach out, I try to speak, but where there was once flesh, there's nothing but protein.