LET IT WASH OVER YOU

A visit to the Mississippi Gulf Coast is one of the last things Cinelle Barnes remembers before a health crisis turned her world upside down. A year later, she reflects on the kindness of strangers-and the cycle of rebirth in a land defined by storms.

- Cinelle Barnes

It was a bright November morning, and I had just flown back from the endless coastline of the Mississippi Gulf, my skin still dewy from the humidity. I'd sat down at my neighborhood café in Charleston to write this very essay, and borrowed a charger from a man drinking an Americano. In return, I'd loaned him my pen. It was, you might say, just like any other day.

But minutes later, life as I knew it was over. Something clapped in my head and before I could place my hand where I felt the thunder, the floor and walls were above me. Everything was in orbit: the charger, the pen, my coffee and laptop. The sun burned my eyes and suddenly even the blue light of my computer was unbearably bright. I tried to turn away but my neck was locked in place. I closed my eyes. Feeling around for my phone, muscle memory allowed me to text my husband an SOS. Four hours later, at the ER, he was told I'd had a brain aneurysm. Hospital staff told him to gather himself, his things, and our daughter and follow the ambulance to a larger hospital's neurological ICU.

Today, one year later, I've fought to regain my strength, my ability to write, and my sense of self. I live with short-term memory loss. I sit here now, reading the words I'd started to draft on that life-changing day, and realize many sentences fail to make sense, because they were being written as my brain was being flooded with blood.