Online Exclusive
Aphasia
Ma. Arlene Ledesma
The children found my mother motionless under her spinning bike by the shore. They called their mothers urgently as if they had discovered a rare shell. My mother woke up, surrounded by white walls and white coats. She heard them speak about the bleed in her brain. Glasgow Coma Scale—nine. Eyes open to name-calling; moaning incomprehensibly. Her hand, once collecting clams for me, palsied, cannot press mine back. After burr holing, her consonants still blur. I sat with her in sessions of syllabification, the language of sea and shores, of bridges falling down, echoing how she used to sing my nursery rhymes. In her sleep, she speaks, ‘I will gather new ones, cowries and sundials.’ Memories try to trace back their synapses like the wiring of a distant constellation. I watch her in her dreams as she searches for more seashells. She presses one close to my ear. I listen to the vacuum of its spiral chamber.
Ma. Arlene L. Ledesma is a physician specialised in Rehabilitation Medicine, an academic staff in the University of Santo Tomas Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, and a board examiner for the Philippine Academy of Rehabilitation Medicine Specialty Board. She holds a Media and Medicine certificate degree from Harvard Medical School. She has several commended poems from Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine (London) and from Dr. Paul Kalanithi Writing Award Stanford University School of Medicine (California, USA). She lives in Manila with her family and rusticates in the intersection of Medicine and Poetry.
