Sparks In My Temporal Lobe

my empty-headed days and richard siken

They found sparks in my left temporal lobe. Cinders, the doctor called them. Not yet aflame, but the potential is there. Along with those cinders are the damaged capillaries along my brain’s neural pathways. After looking at the scans, my neurologist triple-checked my age. I’m too young for this damage. Being in a medically induced coma at thirteen probably didn’t help. Neither did my passionate affair with prescription pain killers. We don’t know precisely why my brain is damaged, but it is.

I suppose I’m thinking about all this because I’m having what I call An Empty-Headed Day. When this happens, my brain refuses to latch onto anything. No movie, no tv show, no book, no podcast, no album, nada. I can barely attach myself securely to one train of thought, the tracks keep crisscrossing unexpectedly, or the tracks just stop all together. Maybe this frustrates me so much because I have an addict’s brain. Whether you’re clean or not, you’ll always have that same stupid brain and the only time I’ve known such radio silence from my own head is when I was quitting drugs. Except then, my head wasn’t totally empty, it’s only thought was “gimme drugs please please please I think we’re dying.” It feels a lot like that today, minus wanting the drugs. See, the problem with days like today is that I don’t want anything. For some that’s a state of zen, but for me? I hate it. I want to want. I hate feeling like this because there are too many books to read and films to watch and essays to write for my head to be empty. I can’t help but suspect my brain is just not in functioning order today. This is something I’m still accepting about my own head, my own limitations. My physical limitations are black and white, easy to accept, but my mental ones? I have a harder time.

I get insecure about all of this. After almost every small exchange with a stranger, I walk away worrying, “Is my brain damage showing?” I worry that I’m the village idiot and everyone in my life is humoring me. I worry that I walk away from talking to someone and they think to themselves, “Poor thing, she’s just not all there.” Some days it takes me a few moments to remember my address, some days I even have to do the math of how old I am. I’ve forgotten before and the falling through a trap-door sensation of being wrong about something so basic has stayed with me. It’s a weird mix of terror and humiliation, this epilepsy/brain damage nonsense. There’s no point in worrying whether it will get worse, whether or not I’ll lose more and more. We’re all losing something, one day at a time. I just might lose it faster. And all that loss can make a girl ravenous.

I have never been so hungry for beauty, for comfort, for love, in my entire life. I sing, everyday, as much as I can. I’ve spent too much time wading through the swamps of survivor’s guilt. There were years that I remember only through glimpses of bruises and blood and broken glass. I’ve spent so much time dying, now I’m more interested in living.

My capacity for remembering things, for learning directions, for information to simply travel from one section of my brain to another may be diminished, but you can’t diminish the feeling of walking my dog on the beach, her little paw prints next to my footprints in the sand, seeing the beauty of the sun breaking through the fog over the ocean, opening and glowing on the water like an elevator to the sublime. These little sparks on an MRI scan may take things from me, but I can still smell the wind as it moves through the eucalyptus trees the next block over. I can read Richard Siken’s poetry for the thousandth time and feel something, feel everything even. He’s long been my favorite poet. He was my first poet really. Reading his poem Scheherazade when I was twelve changed my life.

Scheherazade

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

I remember the first time I read it. It was given to me randomly via an old website called StumbleUpon. (Do you remember StumbleUpon or am I showing my age?) StumbleUpon was a site where you would input your interests and it gave you random webpages to explore. I loved playing around on there, just seeing all of the weird, interesting, random shit the internet had to offer. (The internet was a more innocent place then. Wading randomly through the edges of it sounds like a punishment now.) One day I logged on and hit that “stumble” button and the screen filled with a plain white background and black text. It was this poem. I read it over, and over, and over. Nothing had ever made me feel that way before. I was hooked.

Richard Siken has been writing for decades. His life has been divided into a few before and afters. One being the death of his boyfriend in 1990, which was the inspiration for his award-winning (and gut-wrenching) poetry collection Crush. Since the day I got an iPhone in 2013, I’ve made sure to always have a minimum of three Siken collections on it. I read them while I’m waiting in line, when I’m feeling uninspired, while I’m waiting in the backyard for the rugs to dry after a steam clean. I’ve read his poems on planes, in foreign countries, in countless hospital beds. I’ve pulled out my phone at a hundred shitty parties and read poetry on the porch with the smokers. It’s my secret comfort, knowing his words are always downloaded in my pocket, where cell service and data plans can’t interfere and hold him hostage from me. I need to be able to read this man’s words off the grid and there is only so much room in my purse for books.

In 2019, Richard Siken had a debilitating stroke. He had to relearn how to express himself, how to see and interpret the world, how to communicate his thoughts, his feelings, in new ways. In 2023, he announced his new book I Do Know Some Things, set to be released in August of this year. He described the book as, "77 prose poems about what I can remember about my life. It is autobiographical. A backstage pass." He began writing it as “an exercise to put me back together” after his stroke took away his language as well as his sense of self. This is his first post-stroke poem:

My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he would say, If you don’t stop buying jewelry, I will have to divorce you to keep us out of the poorhouse. When he said this, she would stub out a cigarette, mutter something under her breath. Eventually, he was forced to divorce her. Then, he died. Then she did. The man was not my father. My father was buried down the road, in a box his other son selected, the ashes of his third wife in a brass urn that he will hold in the crook of his arm forever. At the reception, after his funeral, I got mean on four cups of Lime Sherbet Punch. When the man who was not my father divorced my mother, I stopped being related to him. These things are complicated, says the Talmud. When he died, I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t get a death certificate. These things are complicated, says the Health Department. Their names remain on the deed to the house. It isn’t haunted, it’s owned by ghosts. When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.

The two poems are so different, in format, in tone, in imagery. And both are really, really fucking good. Maybe that’s it, maybe I just have to learn, to evolve, to adjust myself to an ever-shifting mind the way he did. Maybe this is all a reeducation in how life feels for me and there’s something to gain here. A new perspective, a realigning of the senses. My brain may have relinquished some details, but who needs the details when there’s so much beauty outside of my window and so much grace in the hearts of those who love me? These are the things I have to remind myself of on these Empty-Headed afternoons. This will pass, as it always does, and hopefully soon I’ll be back in your inbox writing about my life or my niche hyper-fixations. But today, my head is empty and I’m done fighting it. I’m going to relax. I am slowly teaching myself how to let things be, how not to pick at scabs, how to let the laundry pile up for just one day even though the anxious hyper-vigilant over-thinker in me is really hating that pile and fighting every urge to just wash it. But my brain is telling me something with it’s emptiness, it is telling me that it needs rest. True rest. Not a day spent with the ambient knowledge that the horrifically shrill buzzer from my thirty-year old dryer will be going off at any moment. That’s not true rest. Today, I will let my head be empty, if that’s what it wants. I will let it rest, let it recover, and then I will flood that emptiness with joy, joy, joy, and words, words, words.