He considered his new method of writing to be of the ‘embedded’ kind.
Having recently come into a sizeable boost to his bank balance, and being a writer who enjoyed writing a story or a poem about just about anything, he thought he’d try something different. It would be something similar to that of a journalist being assigned to go with some sort of military unit, as it goes into battle. Although, his own intentions were far safer. He would simply travel to those parts of the world that would allow him to soak up the ambience of the place and the earth-shattering events that took place there. This would inspire either a story or a poem to flow freely from his pen.
With this in mind, he had sat with an atlas book opened to show the world spread across two pages. There were three places that immediately came to mind. At the time, he had sat thinking about the sequence he would take.
His plan was to fly to Christchurch in New Zealand first, were there had been an earthquake in 2011 that killed 185 people. From there he’d fly to Mulitaka in Papua New Guinea, where, more recently, a huge landslide had killed anything up to 2,000 people, or more, while they slept. Finally, he would fly to America and visit the place where the Twin Towers were attacked by planes being flown into them, killing nearly 3,000 people all told. As far as possible, he would talk to people who were there when it happened and probably write either a story or a poem that would describe the event.
This was his plan.
On the day, he was crossing the road to get to the taxi rank, to have a car take him to the airport, when something unexpected happened…
When he woke up, he was not embedded, but bedded. To make matters worse, he was suffering from memory loss. He had no physical injuries as far as anyone could tell. The hospital staff were all very nice, but weren’t at all clear about the circumstances that brought him there. It had been suggested that a sudden heart attack had caused short-term memory loss.
At this point, he could only lay there, thinking about what might have happened. He could only remember crossing the street. Had he nearly been hit by a vehicle, with the shock causing a heart attack? Was his large suitcase too heavy to carry, bringing about the same medical condition? Maybe he had remembered something he should take and suddenly turned back, and fell, or did he simply fall and hit his head? Were there any witnesses? How did he get here?
He had no memory of any of it!
Whatever happened, he was definitely embedded in it. One thing was for sure. When he regained his memory, he would definitely write a story or a poem about it.