“What’s that coming over the hill? Is it a monster? Is it a monster?” – The Automatic
You think of these migraines as something outside yourself.
When you wake from an afternoon hibernation, you think to yourself, “Is it gone yet?” No, it hasn’t gone yet; it throbs and writhes just beneath the skin of your scalp, leaning against your eyeballs. It makes you weep when you accidentally look out of the window into the bright sunlight, it rides you like guilt, bearing you down. It’s a monster, announcing itself early in the morning with that faint ache around the eyes, that nausea on an empty stomach, that thirst that you feel too late and now cannot be quenched in time to stop it.
When it eventually hits you, you lose the day. You can’t hope to beat it; you just have to survive. Survival means what survival has always meant, curled into the fetal position in warmth and darkness, reliving memories that take you away from that place, from the pain. The migraine turns you into a monster – a vampire, seeking the darkness, sleeping during the day; a zombie, shuffling around the house when you become desperate for food, for fuel to get you through. It wants nothing more than to make you a monster like itself.
When it’s especially bad, you pray that you might die (and sometimes you even mean it), but you always survive. Your mind keeps working all the way through, running away at a pace until finally you fall asleep. The sleep is not refreshing – you wake up with ashes in your mouth, feeling as if your skull has been hollowed out. You are light on your feet, finally, after that zombie shuffle you had before, but only because your brain is still reeling from the impact.
It doesn’t kill you, but it doesn’t make you stronger either; instead it only reminds you that you are at the mercy of the monster. It wants nothing, it’s just a reflection of the brain misfiring, somehow. The monster is your own mind, and the only lesson it has is that you are at its mercy. You’ll forget that lesson, of course. You always forget that lesson, until the next time, when you wake up with that faint ache around your eyes, and the monster eating the precious day straight from your table.
Tags: migraine
This is just the saddest thing ever.
If I could exchange my fever for your migraines (seeing that in sicknesses fever is a much better bargain), I would do it, that is how good you write.
Thanks Maja, but I wouldn’t wish you to have migraines! Luckily they only last for a day and they don’t come along very often. Now I am a human again!