Sometimes, I decide to make the best of my uncertain future. Sometimes, it puts me into new territory and I don’t feel at all confident. I’ve been feeling lost on occasion. It’s usually only a minute or less. The other day, after taking a picture of my car in its parking spot, and after taking a photo of a street sign, but not a very good one, I walked about a block to a small shopping center. I wanted something to eat, that bookstore on the map app, and a place to pass some time between my cognitive therapy and my occupational therapy sessions.
Lunch was good, but the bookstore was gone, vanished, kaput. Damn. I’ve bought way too many books on Amazon. We all have. I miss shopping in a real bookstore.
I decided to walk back to my car and find a shady place to sit and read. I had plenty of reading to do. But as I walked, I realized I was tired and had that extra fatigue that accompanied having a meal. Did you know how much energy it takes to digest a meal? I learned that fact with the onset of long-Covid. I walked along, but I couldn’t figure out where I’d parked my car. And I had to keep walking or sit on the sidewalk if I needed to rest. Suddenly, I’ve become a connoisseur of benches. The light of the sunny day sparkled my peripheral vision. That didn’t help. I took a couple deep, slow breaths. It wasn’t that far away. I would be okay. I took another slow deep breath. I would, I promised myself, be okay.
I took out my phone and realized that the picture of the sign I took only showed one of the streets but the other was obscured by the angle of the shot. Stupid. I connected the street I knew with my phone’s navigator. I’d have to revise my use of the word stupid.
Crap! I was still disoriented. Did I park east of the shopping center or south? I looked at the picture of my car parked on a lovely residential street with a chestnut tree. I tried to remember my walking route an hour earlier. I had stopped and turned a corner to take the picture and I left the tree-lined streets. A cyclist had stopped abruptly as she raced out of an alleyway. Had I been invisible? We’ll talk about the way middle-aged women become invisible some other time. I still couldn’t figure out where I’d left my car. After the cyclist, I had turned the corner to the shopping center where I could get a sandwich. Easy-peasy, or it should have been.
I was on the other side of everything familiar now, the building, the block, my mind. I couldn’t be more than a block and a half from my car. I kept walking and tried to look not lost. I tried to settle myself without quite knowing where I’d left my car. Then, I saw the biker’s alley. You know, this whole episode was less than three or four minutes. I wasn’t hot or excessively tired or afraid. I was, however, disoriented.
I spent the weekend grieving over my brain. It’s hard to stay serene when it’s your brain that you’re losing.
Thank you for listening, jules