Memory of a Sensation

I’m lying on my side at Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in Philadelphia.  This isn’t long after my memory has started to return, and I’m beginning to recognize there are aspects about my being that have gone through some pretty major changes - short bouts of depression would wash over me.  Confusion was the most consistent emotion, and the fact that this confusion was so prominent was what made the most sense.

Everything had changed.  I didn’t remember it changing, didn’t choose to go through it, couldn’t even really point to the event that caused it - I knew I had been in a car accident, but the accident was completely wiped from my mind.  I just slowly woke over the course of a month, and wasn’t what I worked my life to become.  What’s more, I didn’t have a clear idea of what or who this new self meant.  I was just different - was I even Lethan anymore?

That question hit me hard - was I Lethan?  There were many times when I settled into that question and couldn’t get away from it.


But in this scene, as mentioned above, I’m lying on my side at Magee Rehabilitation Hospital.   This barrage of difficult and painful questions is torturing my mind and my spirit is low.  I’m ready to give up.  I’m just tired, and I’m ready.

And I sense something come into my room.  Though the window.  I’m on the 5th floor, and the windows barred, so I know nothing is actually coming in, but something comes in, moves over to my back, reaches out, touches me - its not a physical hand touching, but it is physical - a physical nothing.  And I sense this essence move into my body, filling me like river filling an empty quarry - and I feel…

Love?

Hope?

A future?


That’s it, a future, a next step - not a solution, but directions to a path that I’ve been called on to travel.

Just like that I feel this thing remove itself from my body - I feel a physical departure and it seeps out through my fingers, and that sense of direction is gone, but the memory of it remains.  And I remember that moment, so I didn’t give up.


I discuss this moment in storytelling, and I think its an important moment to return to because of that profound memory of feeling a sense of direction which kept me going.


What was it that touched me?  I won’t rattle on about my philosophies here - there are other entries for that.  All I will say is that it was an event, and I do remember it, and I’m still trying to pick out the right path that was suggested in that moment…its just a memory of a sensation, so the details are tricky to pick out, but knowing that path exists motivates me to keep searching.