Radio Silence

There's not much doing in my head these days. A cursory listen to the space between my temples shows something akin to a pub with no beer. Everyone has buggered off.
Whereas once it was a bustling, noisy place where a throng of voices clamoured for attention, now it seems to be deserted. I don't know where everyone went.
It used to be that an idea would spark a torrent of words, each one falling over itself in its rush to be expressed. One word led to another which led to another until ere long there was a number of paragraphs which somehow explained what had occurred to me and gave some release.
It's not that the words have gone. I can wield them as deflty as ever from the mace-blow of a blunt statement to the stilletto precision of a careful inference.
But the ideas seem to have departed. Things just don't pop into my head any more. Even writing this is like passing a kidney stone.

It could be that my brain is rewired after my haemorage. Indeed, given the area of my brain in question, this is quite likely. The pre-frontal cortex performs a lot of high level  executive functions and it may just be that the spontaneity of observation and reaction I relied upon, which  "just happened" just isn't working now.
I know some neurons, I don't know how many, will have died and with them some of the functions they performed. A loss of blood flow in the brain can do that, even a small interruption.
I know also that planning and attribution of significance to information is impaired. I confess, I don't feel as clever as I did before. Thinking is hard and makes me immediately fatigued. Perhaps all of this is implicated in the departure of the Muse from my life.

But I miss it painfully. I feel stupid, mentally clumsy, profoundly empty and somewhat lonely as a result of the loss of this drive to communicate. The long rambling email conversations I used to have with friends just dried up. The meandering discussions of abstract concepts, arcane but relevent to the experience of the human condition we all share just no longer happen. And I miss it all. Abjectly. I just find suddenly, I have very little to say. And I feel lesser.

Perhaps it will come back. I know the latest research on neurons seems to indicate that they do not regenerate. We do not make more of them as adults: Dead neurons are not replaced. However, there are an awful lot of them and those functions which were once performed by now defunct circuitry can be remodelled by the remaining adjacent neural machinery. This is "neural plasticity". To retrain the brain to do what it once did but is now reluctant to do takes application and persistence. I must do those things I want it to get better at. I must do them a lot. and the circuitry will gradually be built by that doing.
Whether this can return an ability that defined a character, I cannot say. Only time and experience will tell. But I am going to give it a bloody good try. And if it doesn't, then it doesn't and I will live with what I have available to me now. At least I still have my words.