It shouldn’t come as a surprise, of course, but it inevitably does, the extent to which your emotions are affected by a brain injury. Unexpected showers is the first thing I put down on paper after the stroke, during the first week of my hospitalisation in Gasthuisberg. I already knew that I could still read well (thankfully!), but I had not yet tried to write anything meaningful.
I was in my room just after breakfast when two nurses came in to help me get dressed. They found me sitting on the bed, crying like I would never stop. After the news on the radio the traffic report had come on, with the usual bottlenecks on the Antwerp and Brussels rings. I should have been on my way to school that morning, going round both of them.
An hour or so later, the psychologist on duty approached me to ask if I would like to talk. It seemed like a good idea, and afterwards I wrote this. I still don’t know whether to call it poetry or prose. But what I discovered then, was that it was helpful to me, and that by writing things down, I might be able to give them a place, and help me understand the new me.
And maybe, little by little, even accept it.
UZ Gasthuisberg, March 2017
It’s going to rain again today.
I can feel it in the air.
High pressure, somewhere in the North of my head collides with a mountain range of emotions, and the precipitation begins.
I feel the wetness on my cheeks, though I haven’t been outside for five days now.
And then, very suddenly, with nothing I can do to stop it, the rain falls.
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