Migraine

I have had perhaps four or five episodes of migraine headaches in my life. I don't want any more.

It is inadequate to call a migraine a headache: it is more a whole body displacement. It is like going out of focus. The nausea rises and rises until you are blind with it. But it is a nausea of its own kind somehow not digestive. Do I want to eat, or not? So, you eat something...but, no, I didn't want to eat at all, the food lies flat and heavy in your mouth. The metallic taste that seeps down from your brain through your skull and onto your tongue makes you feel like you are chewing on a nice fragment of the handlebars on your bicycle. You can barely see: or, rather you look but you don't see. Light itself suddenly feels poisonous, vile and agressive. People speak words to you but they don't speak syntax. Words no longer run like tickertape lines across the bottom of your brain's screen. They are now like heavy lotto balls swimming round and round and popping suddenly out! one by one but not with any sense of relief just outness. You feel regret for something you must have done to feel like this, but you can't remember what it was, because there wasn't anything. You make yourself promises you'll never drink coffee again, or red wine, or any other headachy thing, but they weren't to blame. You go to sleep, but it isn't sleep that you have, it is just shutting your eyes and waiting with the neckstiff burr of blood on your plastic-waxy eardrum tom-toms.

A migraine is an assault on being itself. It's dreadful power lies in the fact that you can't locate it anywhere, so you can't mollify it or tame it. It seperates you from your body even though you know that without your body you aren't anyone.