The Recipe for Tea

Before I exactly knew what was wrong with me, I just knew something was wrong, and I needed some help, quick. I knew I was sleeping a lot and was disoriented, but as a divorcée, my freezer is stocked with a year's worth of frozen dinners. Except as the days wore on, I had to acknowledge this was not just shock I was going through.

I called my mom to fly out. No biggie, right? Let's get off of the couch, Freud, about my childhood. It was much simpler than that. All of a sudden, I had a witness to my, what did my mom call them? Hiccups.

This is my favorite hiccup, and it's not because I enjoy it. It's because four weeks beyond the accident, I have trouble remembering exactly how tea is made. Tea.

I started educating myself on some of the ongoing effects of a head injury. I remember reading about a woman who could not figure out how to operate a microwave or ATM. While I was having insane migraines and brain fog, I could actually perform some pretty complex tasks occasionally. Forget simple things? Surely not I. Except the first first time I made myself tea, my mom was around. 

My first cup of tea, post-accident. I made it, carried it over to the coffee table, let it steep. I glanced over at it. It wasn't, um, steeping. Like, can teabags be defective? I knew my sense of time was terrible and gave it longer. Another five minutes or so, I was perplexed. The bag didn't seem to be...doing anything. But how do you accuse a bag of tea into not becoming tea? That's preposterous. The water had a sickly hint of color, if I squinted. Good enough. I took a big sip, then, shocked, exclaimed to my mom, "This tea is cold!"

Just what had happened here? I thought and thought and thought. What could have gone wrong? My mom kindly said I'd had a bit of a hiccup. I'd simply filled the mug with tap water, skipped a crucial step, and thrown in the teabag. Hot water makes tea. Hot. Water.

Here's my least favorite part. The girl who forgot how to operate her microwave or an ATM? I'm the girl who still occasionally forgets how tea works. And the worst is that it's not an instantaneous done-it-again moment. This includes hardcore troubleshooting. Like, call a software tech. The recipe for making a cup of hot tea seems to have gotten lost with the concussion. 

I don't forget how to make tea every time, but if I call you over to my house for a nice hot cup of it, you might want to just bring your own.