No Words

Some days after the brain injury I look at the people I once loved—who they have chosen to become, the way they now treat others—and I have no words. The choices land heavy: the coldness, the self-destruction, the casual cruelty handed out to anyone still standing close enough to feel it. I watch the person I used to know dissolve into someone unrecognizable, and the silence that follows is thick. There is nothing useful to say when the evidence is right there in how they move through the world.

Sometimes people simply decide to throw their life away. They pick the path that burns everything—relationships, opportunities, their own future—and the decision is theirs alone. My brain injury plays no role in it. The injury did not push them. It did not excuse them. It did not cause the choices that hollowed them out. That's almost the hard part. You wish you could blame the injury to have a reason, but that's not it. They walked that road themselves, and the only thing left for me is the quiet recognition that their freefall was never mine to stop or to own.