I spoke the words...

...but never gave a thought to what they all could mean.

Some things leading to this post:

1) Talking with Kelly tonight, about nothing at all.

2) A section of the book I'm reading, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, talking about how bad hospital food is.

3) My growing awareness of my spotty memory.



After reading that part of the book (although it is listed above as "2", it was actually the last in the series of events to spark this post.) I began to think about what I thought of hospital food. I ate a great deal of hospital food during my stay, about three meals a day for roughly 3 weeks. Granted, I didn't eat for about a week, but I make up for lost time in the amount of late night ice cream I stole from the freezer while everyone else was sleeping. Honestly, I don't remember liking or hating hospital food. It doesn't really jump out at me as my biggest worry at the time, I was more concerned with finally regaining my ability to hobble to the bathroom with out my crutches. Yes, that was a process that took up a good deal of my time. Along with remembering if, and how, I had done it the day before. Anyway, hospital food was not really the point of this.

I began to think of Kelly, and trying to remember her during that time in my life. There are a few things I know for certain:

I know she came to see me, with Kait, and her mother. And I know her general reaction when she first heard what happened.

I really only KNOW these things because she told me later on, after I started to work again, during numerous talks about the situation. There are a lot more things that I THINK I know, but I really have no idea. And yeah, this kind of is The Diary of James Walsh. (Raise your hand if you get that joke.) I'm fairly certain that prior to her visit, I talked to Kelly, and many members of her family, possibly even friends of ours, on the phone in my room. I'm pretty sure I know this because I remember her father telling me I should get some food at this place down that street from the hospital, I guess it's pretty good. I'm also pretty sure at some point, I got food from this place, I think my parents brought it to me. But anyway, I think I vaguely remember talking to her father, and I'm just taking advantage of the obvious here, if I talked to Kelly's father on the phone, I probably talked to her.

More importantly, I'm pretty sure she cried when she came to see me. I don't, however, really remember her coming to see me. Like I said, I KNOW it happened, but that doesn't really mean I remember it. I do seem to remember this one part though, her having to leave the room at one point, due to tears. I've seen Kelly cry before, Kelly has seen me cry as well, blah blah, we are close. But this is different. This is something that through all the fog of my shattered memory of the time, I have stuck in my head. Just this image of her covering her face in tears, leaving the room, at what I can only assume is a shocking sight of a best friend in a hospital bed. It's fucking terrible, I know, but it's a fucking beautiful, in a poetic sort of way, moment in a friendship. Looking back how many times can you say you've ever seen someone breakdown in raw emotion like that, let alone over you. She has told me over and over again how she broke down when she heard what happened, but hearing it is just so much different than just seeing it.

This is just, what I think to be, a landmark moment in anyones life. It's such a piece of literature I almost have trouble believing it's real. And no, not because of the head injury. But it just seems, I say again, kind of poetic. It's tragic, but it's beautiful. It's heartbreaking really, it's almost too much for words.

I hope I have done it justice, without over doing it. This is just something I have stuck in me forever, and I kind of wanted to talk about it.