Incomplete Trauma Narrative
Brandon North
Northeast Ohio Writer
You ate oatmeal with banana and pecans. You did the child’s pose for half an hour to stretch your perineum. You put on Beethoven’s Holy Song of Thanksgiving. You buzzed off your thinning hair, using two mirrors to make sure you didn’t miss a spot in the back. You washed yourself slowly in the bathtub. You made a smoothie and drank it in your broken-down office chair. You wrote yourself a note in your phone: Things survived are most forgotten in the search for certainty. You could sit upright in any chair without any pain in your back for the first year after your trauma. You smelled the cool air after a late summer rain. You listened to the reports of the violins. You would see two specialist doctors the next morning. You didn’t know that neither would help you diagnose what else had become wrong with your body. You straightened your underwear for less constriction. You did not critique the flight calligraphy of the birds outside your window. You checked your email, having long blocked any messages with the term Post-Finasteride Syndrome. You didn’t have any important messages. You’d had curled fingers inside your anus to massage knotted muscles and you didn’t know if you’d need more. You didn’t get an explanation for what happened to you from the ER doctor. You remembered not wanting to talk to your family for weeks after the story started. You heard the music solve the case of itself. You decided not to make another appointment with your therapist. You took more of the thousands of pictures you’ve taken of the gleaming bald spot on the crown of your head. Your wife needed time alone again, after another day of counseling children. Your bed was unmade, like most days. You repeated a mantra, eyes closed, in meditation. You became a dark, foggy lake that memories ferried across. You were writing fiction the night the symptoms started. You were constantly tired of the commas of arrested time. You felt like a missing person unless you were being asked questions.
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Brandon North is a working-class, disabled, and multi-genre writer from Ohio. He is the author of the chapbook From The Pages of Every Book (Ghost City Press), and his poems and prose appear or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Annulet, The Cleveland Review of Books, Bridge (Chicago), and elsewhere.
Social Media Twitter: @brandonenorth Instagram: @brandonenorth |
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