Listening

There was no gradual awakening as from sleep. No transition. No bleary-gray moments, then awareness. No before.

Just … NOW.

And gasps for air.

And the shock of skin pressed into the harsh cleft texture of ice-cold slate.

But I could retrieve no memories of that floor or of the cabin that sheltered it.

It’s okay.

No worries.

You’ve got this.

Slow as you go.

Slow as I go?

Your breathing. Slow your breathing.

I knew whom I was — at least, it didn’t occur to me to wonder at that moment — but not where or when.

Perhaps I wasn’t alone?

I called out, “hoouooh?”

What the … !?

No one answered.

Good, that. While I recalled the words and conventions of this language, I’d lost the motor memory for voicing it, so produced little more than grunts, which were embarrassing enough to experience alone.

Plus, I was lying in pee, long gone cold and clammy, so, yeah, I was relieved I was the only witness.

Okay, maybe worry … just a little.

Between long, shaky pauses, I inch-wormed to a window and saw a landscape blanketed by snow so deep, it was clear that I was far from home.

Home?

The problem with … scratch that. One of the many challenges of perpetual travel is retaining a sense of home. Home is where your people are, and while I still knew whom my people were, panic threatened as I realized, I could not recall which compass point might lead back to them.

It was my second hemorrhagic stroke. The first, in 2015 — also minor — introduced itself with an audible pop, then erased about 40 percent of my field of vision. A degenerative retinal condition has since blurred the rest.

Vision loss meant I could no longer drive, thus the bicycle. Fair enough. I prefer the bike.

But life without speaking?

I had just completed my first bike journey through each of the 48 U.S. mainland states, when I had that second stroke. Still exhausted, I sought refuge in an Airbnb I’d visited the year before in a quaint township on a river in New England.

Its owner and I began each morning over coffee. As the weeks progressed, she spoke of her fears and aspirations, and I had only eye contact and body language with which to assure her that I did indeed hear. That I understood. That I cared.

Most of my speech-therapy sessions were conducted remotely, via the internet. Of course, there was an app for that, too. With little else to occupy me, I had ample time to be of service, and I found much that needed doing around her 200-year-old house. I shoveled snow, sorted its cluttered basement, cut, split, and stacked firewood, repaired furniture, painted, and made myself generally useful.

But mostly I listened.

And I began to feel at home.

A few months later, we’d walked to a local restaurant for dinner, where she introduced me to an acquaintance as, “… my companion, Gary.”

Companion? Yes, that was indeed who I had become. I was Diana’s companion.

Eventually, I felt confident enough in our friendship that I dared speak. Struggling to form individual words, still unable to string them into sentences, I stammered what was in my heart.

Better had I let us be whoever we might. Better had I continued to simply live what I could not say.

Therapy eventually restored basic speech, but it still does not flow. I must en-vi-sion each syl-la-ble as I pro-nounce it, if you are to understand me. I see and read the words, as if text formed on an ephemeral display, which might distract me from seeing you, if we were to talk in person.

Some find the resulting unfocused stare off-putting.

That second stroke also cost some memories. How many? What percentage? I’ve no way to know, because that’s how memory works … and how it doesn’t.

When, in 2019, a cousin asked if I had contact information for another cousin, it was as if I’d discovered a physical folder labeled Cousin Mike, but the file was empty. How do we know what we don’t remember, until confronted with something or someone, like the existence of a cousin whom we can’t recall?

More than the memories themselves, I lost my sense of their contexts. I’ll recognize a restaurant, parkway, or neighborhood, but will still be unable to access in which city I am.

I wrote first drafts of two books during the early bicycle journey — one fiction, the other non — before the 2018 stroke, and planned to complete final drafts while in New England later that spring. But when I revisited them, I did not recognize many of the people in their stories. Even the prose was unfamiliar.

I don’t miss driving, and I now only ride in others’ cars as a last resort. The bike is a blessing, but walking is even more so. And although I can now speak well enough to be understood, I often go days without talking. Like automobiles, speech has become a last resort. Instead, I write some 1500 words each day, mostly for my own benefit. Some, such as these, I share with a trusted few.

I’ve kept a daily journal since high school, with no pretense of ever having cause to publish any of it. Most use language to resolve problems through conversations with others; I worked through mine by writing — internal conversations, if you will.

Add research notes and drafts of articles and books, email and text threads, ad copy, ledgers, geo-tagged photos, GPS tracks, and other such digital records, and I have effective, artificial substitutes for mental memories.

How accurate are those journal and memoir notes? Given that many read like fiction, who knows? I appear to have been my own harshest critic, though, which argues in favor of their credibility. Regardless, they are more reliable than the bits my mind can still retrieve from my brain alone.

I posted an essay about structural racism here recently that was largely repetition of a journal entry I recorded in 2017, when I pedaled through New England the first time. I no longer have independent recall of those events, but that entry had the ring of truth, so I felt confident publishing it here. Still, that essay failed to resolve the conflict I feel between living our truths versus declaring them in words.

How do we live our aspirations? That’s the hard part. I think the closest I’ve come was when I could not speak so had no option but to listen, then do all that embodied the love I felt.