#111: (Brain) Fog on the Channel
Eoghan cut off
I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!
This week, a mea cupla (and an explanation) for last week’s missed newsletter.
Yesterday I almost forgot to get off the bus. The number 95 had just pulled into the stop at Troon, but I hadn’t registered and it was only the chivvying of the children that I realised we’d reached our destination and had to get off. Then, once we were in the metro, I couldn’t remember which station we were supposed to choose - Simonis or Elisabeth (this is, as any Bruxellois will know, a kind of a trick question, because the metro line is more or less a loop and Simonis and Elisabeth are in reality two different floors of the same metro terminus). N said Elisabeth and I said she was wrong and that it was Simonis, but of course she was right and I was wrong.
Going to the football on Sunday, I forgot to download the children’s tickets, incurring a long queue at the dinky little ticket office at the Stade Marien and missing the first - and only - Union goal of the day. Last week I forgot I was supposed to write a newsletter article at the beginning of the week, and I forgot too by the time Friday came around. It was the first week I had failed to produce a newsletter entry since the start of the year. I almost forgot to write this week’s edition too; Last night before bed I wound my alarm clock around so that the hand was at the number seven, but I forgot to set the mechanism that allows the little clock to make a noise and only dragged myself out of bed at nine, the last to rise when i had wanted to be the first, to have the house to myself to be able to write this short missive from foggy Brussels. Even just now, I had almost to recourse to googling the word for “clock hand” because I just couldn’t grasp hold of the word in my mind, nor translate it to my fingers.
I woke up this morning in a holiday home in Érezée in the lower Ardennes, having escaped Brussels for a short family holiday. It felt appropriate that the house was surrounded by a heavy mist, restricting visibility to the hedge at the end of the garden. I have been stumbling through a protracted neurological fog of my own these past couple of weeks, different in character and duration than I am used to. Brief periods of brain fog are not unfamiliar to me; they usually come in the wake of a migraine attack, preceded by the telltale visual hallucinations and hanging around for several days after the acute headache stage has receded.
This time however, there has been no hallucinatory augury, and little of the traditional migraine achiness either; just a sense of inexactitude, a hazy insubstantiality, and an exhaustion. I find myself falling asleep at the shortest prompt; I sit and watch a stage of the Tour De France with Z, feeling like a narcoleptic, measuring the length of my fitful naps not in the amount of time passed but in the number of kilometres remaining for Ben O’Connor at the head of the race. 40km, 31km, 8km. I pull myself out of the well for long enough to see him cross the line at the Col de la Loze, beating his chest through the fog that has enveloped the mountain summit.
My body and I have always had an antagonistic relationship, but of all my dysfunctional body parts my brain has at least been reliable. I accept, more or less, the irregular bouts of migraine disturbances because I know and can navigate their rhythms now and because I have convinced myself for better or worse that they are some kind of price to pay for my brain’s other, higher-functioning capabilities. I am not frightened so much by this latest bout of brain fog as by the fact that I do not know where it comes from nor how long I can expect it to last. What am I if I don’t have my brain?
In the local swimming pool last Saturday I sat at the edge of the pool absentmindedly between slow laps. There was a man sharing the lane with me, a bear of a one with a broad back matted with thick black hair that was pulled away from his skin by the force of the water’s currents and floated back and forth like a kelp field caught in the broil of a high tide. In a moment of lucidity I looked at his back and his undulating forest of hair and I felt like a strand of kelp, buffeted by the waves, at the mercy of an invisible force, unable to grip hold of anything, and just waiting for the tide to recede.
Very nice read- as always. Thank you.