Angels and Demons

The loss of self is often the real tragedy of a traumatic brain injury, yet I experience it on a daily basis without the physical impairment. The loss of direction, the loss of hope and piteous supplications. This loss is so profound that only some understood… Some took days, some took weeks, some others – Months and years – In a bide to retain and cling on to something called sanity.

This loss is a soul shattering experience, passionate and intimate. It is so intimate that society as a whole averts its eyes and closes its ears to the pain and despair of such a naked soul. It is a soul bedeviled by infantile demons, the very stuff from which neurosis and psychosis is made. We apply strange and frightening remedies, trying to mend what’s broken into something not. In the vain attempts to effect a cure for a pain that doesn’t exists in the medical books, we perform modern rites of exorcism to rid us of such demons…

These demons are the very angels that made us love in the first place. Without wings, and only a broken heart, they transmogrify into the very darkness that made us do and feel what we did and felt. Perhaps the only thing that’s left of this flightless self would be our instincts. The instinct of survival, the instinct to find love, and to love again…

I wonder if mine are still intact… Or perhaps, they are buried somewhere, under the denial that I desire no love, incapacitated by the fear of falling from such heights again…