They’re taking my brain upstate, and I don’t know when I’ll get it back

Generally speaking, I came out pretty well! Well, except my brain fell out of my head.

Image Credit: James Wily

I was in an incident. No, accident. I was in an inci-accident, from what I can recall. I was mostly fine. No broken limbs, or torn ligaments, or sprained ankles, or twisted cuffs, or anything like that. Generally speaking, I came out pretty well!

Well, except my brain fell out of my head. I don’t recall exactly which part of the incident that that happened, but it must have happened because people tell me that it did. Apparently, it ran along the road for another kilometre, skidding, sliding and protesting (very loudly) the whole time that “this is no way to treat a brain!”.

(He’s quite chatty, my brain.)

That’s the marvellous thing about a brain: it can do so many things for you that you don’t even notice! But given the chance, all it will want to do is complain about that time you forgot asparagus on the latest grocery trip-

I’m so sorry! I just realised I called it an incident earlier. I meant to call it an accident. I, and my brain (which is quite chatty, do you remember that?) were in an accident. Accident. I was mostly fine- oh, I’ve already done that bit, haven’t I? Let me just read the above section to remind myself where I was.

Right. I’m sorry again. Truly. I’m just not as sharp as I used to be without my brain.

I still have a brain, by the way, but it's just a Loan-A-Brain©: that’s a spare brain they loan you if your first one gets into an accident. The lovely hospital people gave me this brain to use while my actual one was getting fixed. They didn’t answer when I asked how long this would take. Just that my first brain was very beat-up. Too many holes, apparently.

“Too many holes”, the head-doctor said. “It’s actually not very good for a brain to have too many holes. Now, wrinkles! That’s what you like to see in a brain: wrinkles upon wrinkles, only worrying about themselves.” It was at this point that the smooth faced head-doctor paused, and started to look a little misty eyed. “We could learn a lot from our brain wrinkles.”

Too many holes is no good for a brain you see, because your thoughts and feelings fall through them and into the rest of your body where they don’t belong.

I think I noticed this after the incident- the accident! Accident! The feeling of something slipping through the newly-formed cracks in my brain and leaking down my body, sometimes all the way down to the soles of my feet. It was just a few holes, that’s all. Just a few holes and everything got out:

I recall I felt my anxiety in my leftmost toe when I walked into the hospital. I felt a pang of the forlorn in my femur when I was told about the holes in my head, and at one point, I had the morbid compulsion to put my hand inside one of the discarded hypodermic bins. Fortunately, I found the self-restraint not to do that in the space where my appendix used to be. I suppose the wrinkles are meant to catch all that.

So, they decided to send my brain upstate to get these holes filled in (74 of them to be precise), at a special Brain-Hole-Filling-in Facility™. I need to use this Loan-A-Brain© until then. I tell my friends that I can’t wait for my brain to be fixed. I don’t know why they didn’t look excited for me.

The Loan-A-Brain© isn’t all bad. It works decently enough. It took a few weeks to properly adjoost to the new brain. It couldn’t tie a tie, it didn’t know how to do the shoelace up on the left side, and it didn’t even know the word for the thing that runs along the edge of the place where the wall and the ceiling meet…

…

A cornice! That’s it. I do know it.

My partner tells me I shouldn’t complain about the Loan-A-Brain©, that I need to understand that sometimes, old brains can take forever to be fixed. That’s alright I think. I’ve mostly gotten used to how the Loan-A-Brain© pulls at the back of my head every now and then for no particular reason.

And how the letters on the back of pamphlets wobble a bit more than they used to.

And how it takes me a bit longer to calculate the correct distance between me and my most mortal enemies.

And how I need to take a nap if I think about anything larger than my house for too long.

And how I can’t watch movies without little vapours pouring out of my ears after an hour.

That’s all alright, I think.

Sometimes, I still find thoughts and feelings inside of me that fell out from the incident.

ACCIDENT.

And it makes me wonder what my old brain is up to now. Does it forgive me? Does it think of me back? Want me back even? Is it still as wrinkly as it used to be? I hope these thoughts don’t slip through one of its many holes.

It can’t be long now until my real brain is fixed. It can’t be too long, it mustn’t be.

…

I hope it comes back. I miss my real brain.