Waking

My eyes opened, or maybe they had already been open, with these things you can never tell, at least not at first, and not unless someone was with you when your eyes either opened or already were. You need a witness account, and you may be you and think you know yourself best, but in the aftermaths of these things you’re no more reliable or able to pronounce what happened than a golden retriever.

No offense.

But in any event I regained consciousness. My hands were slick with sweat, and maybe rain as well if it had fallen while I was out, hard to say, and I brushed my fingers clumsily against my running shorts, the sort of panicked haste that makes the fingers tangle under each other with each swipe, the pinky and ring finger becoming caught in the loose-fitting but stubborn material of the shorts and cracking at the knuckles as the middle and index catch up.

Next stop for those fingers was my eyes, and they rose to smack me not directly in the eyeballs but just above and to the sides, colliding with the orbital bones and sanding out across both sides of my head into an aggressive and aggrieved massage of the temples. The pain in the friction of it, my penance for the sins of my neurons, the physical manifestation of my violent and intensifying incredulity. My confession and absolution.

Only then, I noticed that I was standing.

How long had I been out this time? Seven minutes, eight? More? I checked my Fitbit as if somehow it would have the answer this time, though it couldn’t, and I knew that in a minute or so when I caved to my temptation to take a peek at my phone’s workout app it very well might show me that in my unconsciousness I wandered around on the paved trail, that I zig-zagged to and fro and forward and back between the concrete barrier that kept the trail from the suburban road and the lattice metal fence that kept the runners and bikers and walkers and dogs from falling onto the busy highway.

I tried to look around, but my neck hurt. It always hurt with these things. I figured the pain was because seizures affect the nervous system so dramatically and the neck is where the spine and brain make their increasingly tenuous connection, but maybe it was the same basic thing except for ‘nervous’ replaced by ‘muscular.’

I don’t know now any more than I knew then, and every time I talked to my doctors I forgot to ask about it, and don’t even get me started about my memory.

So where was I? Where was I standing, and where was I going with this? Hang on, I know this one…