I'm Lost
The convention center is a city that forgot to put up street signs. Escalators pour into other escalators. Hallways branch and then branch again. Every direction looks almost familiar until it isn’t. People move in currents with purpose I can’t match. I stand in the middle of it with a brain that no longer does maps the way it used to and can't keep up.
I have a brain injury. That sentence still feels strange to say out loud, but it explains the constant low-grade panic of not knowing where I am, what time it is, or whether I’m supposed to be somewhere else already. Schedules blur. Room numbers rearrange themselves in my head. The plan I carefully reviewed that morning dissolves the moment I step into the main lobby. Nothing here is familiar. The lights, the carpet patterns, the distant announcements—all of it registers as noise instead of information.
I try to find people I know. I try to find the right training rooms. I check my phone, then check it again because the first look didn’t stick. I ask the same volunteer the same question twice and feel the heat of embarrassment rise even though they are kind. Time slips. One moment I am early; the next I am late and cannot reconstruct how that happened. I walk past the correct doorway twice because the sign does not connect to the place I thought I was going. The conference app is a maze of its own. I lose the thread of the day’s agenda the way you lose a thought mid-sentence.
I walk into IHOP to eat and the server looks at me like I am out of place and says kindly, “Can I help you sir?” “I'm just looking to eat?” I reply. “I apologize sir you just looked confused when you came in”. I guess at times it's that obvious.
And yet.
These have been two of the best days of communication I’ve had with my sister in three years.
She is not here in Texas. She is hundreds of miles away. But the texts and calls have been different this time—longer, easier, more real. Between getting turned around again and standing in yet another identical hallway trying to remember which session I’m supposed to be in, I’ve received a message from her. Not performing competence. Not pretending the fog isn’t thick. Just… talking. Hearing her voice cut through the noise of the convention center in a way nothing else does. Something familiar that has been lost for too long. I hope my family can move here so that can remain.
There is something strangely clarifying about being this disoriented. The usual performance of having it together in my daily routine at home falls away. I cannot pretend. So maybe that's part of the conversations with her these days having gone differently and more real than they have in a long time. The distance is still there, but the connection feels closer than it has in years. There's nothing routine about it even though finally like old times years ago to wake up and see a kind text from her the day before that I didn't see anywhere in the last years in the lost gap. Something positive to start the day with in praying for her among the others.
I keep thinking about that. Maybe the problem was never only the miles. Maybe my wife and I just need to move so we can have something real together again with others. To break the routine that keeps us trapped from having something real with those we love most. It's paradoxical but perhaps in more distance we’ll be closer like she’s been with me these days. I wish I had gone to Texas three years ago and never had lost her then. Even if life stays imperfect and my brain stays foggy going forward, these two days of being completely lost have shown me how good it still feels when we can actually reach each other.
I will probably leave this convention center in a couple days still a little confused about which exit leads where. I will probably replay the wrong turns on the ride home. I'm dreading TSA and the airport again. But I will at least have written down the memory of these days when the fog was thick and the building made no sense, and yet my sister and I found each other across the distance more clearly than we have in a long time, at least for now. I'm grateful for that even though I'm still lost right now.
