The Story of Eye Opening

This is just a little story about Eye.  It’s a day in Eye’s life - just a blink in the fold of space-time.

A short-time ago, not far away, Eye closed her laptop and got in her carriage, a silver van, to drive to teach her yoga class.  Inside the yoga room there were the regulars and then there were a couple of new ones.  On her trip to class, Eye had a premonition about death.  She just prayed, asking God to watch over her pets and Adam, and to cleanse her mind and soul.

See, Eye has a morning ritual.  She burns two tea lites.  One lite for the living-now and another for the living-forever, but it’s really the same.  Living now is living forever, but in this space-time continuum, there is still this separation in the mind.

After her power-yoga class, she called her boyfriend, Adam.  This was their routine to check-in after her yoga classes.  Step by step as she talked on her iPhone and walked from the 6th floor towards the exit of the club, Eye noticed subtle changes in her awareness.  “I love you,” she said before she hung up. She walked up to her silver carriage, and opened the sliding door. After putting her yoga bag inside, she sat behind the driver seat. She sat and sat. Then she recognized something wasn’t right with her mind.  

She called Adam back.  “I’m not okay to drive. Can you please pick me up?” They arranged to meet at the parking lot of the club.  “I can’t leave the van here, we need to move to a higher floor” and that was all she remembered saying.  After those words, the rest of Eye’s story is only bits and pieces from what others’ said, and mostly from Adam whom she trusted whole-heartedly.

Adam thought she was having a stroke, because she couldn’t answer any of his basic questions. She couldn’t remember where she worked, what she does for a living, that her sister was ill and that she was about to travel to see her sister. “Is my mother alive?” she had asked him. He called a friend, a doctor, who advised him to bring her to ER right away. In the event of a stroke then there was only a window of 4 hours before irreversible damage to her brain that could leave Eye paralyzed. During the drive to the hospital, Eye was not even aware of the heavy downpour . She had asked him, when they stopped at the house, “Where did the lilacs come from?” She had forgotten her day trip to Acton to buy fresh lilacs the day before.

Upon arrival at the hospital the staff were quick to react.  A battery of tests ensued (blood tests, MRIs, EEG).  While she laid inside the chamber of the big machine, she asked herself, “Do I have insurance?”, “Do I have a job?”, “Who do I work for?”  “What kind of work do I do?”  These questions formed to in her head, the kind of questions asked for basic self-preservation and continuity… but of what?  

Before being wheeled on a gurney to the MRI room, she spoke with an angel, a staff member of the hospital.  He reassured her she’s going to be fine.  “What’s your name?” she asked him.  “Jesse”.  (“Almost like “Jesus” she thought, except for one letter and order of the letters).  “I’ll pray for you” Jesse said.  While inside the chugging machine of moving magnets Eye began to ask questions about the mind.  What is memory?  Who am I?  What is ego? Eye thought, “I have no memory.  The doctor said she suspects I have ‘Transient Global Amnesia’ (TGA).  Amnesia?!  Who am I?  I know me, the one watching and processing what’s going on, but I can’t remember how I came to be here.”  While Eye and Adam waited for her turn inside the tunnel of the big machine, she had asked him repeatedly, “Why am I here?”, “How did I get here?”  

There she was unaware of time passing.  She witnessed the movement from one event to another: the insertion of the IV needle into her arm, the shoe being tucked near her leg, and the wiggle of her toe, the lights above her passing by like the ties of a railroad track. All these events seemed infinite until another stimulus invited her attention.  

“What is memory?” she pondered.  “Is ego my memory?” “Is memory my perspective, an interpretation of what’s going on?”  “What if I never get my memory back?”  “Is this surrender?”

This story of Eye, a blink in the space-time continuum does not have a good or bad ending.  It just is.  It’s just a continuity from one event to another, so Eye thought upon her release from the hospital.  The ER doctor signed her “discharge” papers after all tests showed everything as “normal” in the relative means of “normal”.  

What an anomaly, Eye thought.  She feared having a recurrence of this event, though “Transient Global Amnesia”, she was told, and upon her research, does not have recurrent incidents from known historical cases.  As she prepared comfort food that night upon repatriating with her pets and the cozy nest with Adam, she tried to knit together the events of the past 48 hours.

She thought how funny that Jesse came out to the entrance of the ER as she was about to re-enter the building to deliver a box of chocolates. She had asked Adam to buy chocolates so that they can offer their gratitude to the heroes working in the ER. Her impulse was to hug Jesse, but refrained because of the pandemic protocols. “I wish I had anyway”, she thought in retrospect.

Jesse: I was just bringing this wheelchair back to the curb.

Eye: I was about to leave these chocolates for you guys. Thank you so much for taking care of me! Isn’t it weird about the timing of it. What a coincidence!

Jesse: There are no coincidences in the Universe.

Adam was laid out on the couch watching “froth” as he coined the “eye and brain candy” movie, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. She offered him a bowl of pasta, which he declined. He was exhausted too after the string of events in the past 48 hours. Eye lit another tea lite candle before sitting down to the bowl of steaming pasta. She bowed her head in reverence as she dedicated the light to All Beings as One without separating those in the living-now and the living-forever. She told Adam, “If I had a recurrence of this event then I sense it would be permanent.”  This she believed as a true surrender of the little “i” to the bigger “I’.  For what does it matter what Eye thought herself to be.  Her existence in this somewhere-place in this sometime-time is a blink in the breath of the universe.