Cursed January. Always this time of year. Something in the lung-burning air flips a switch in my head telling my already jittery neurons to go haywire. Don’t you wanna try? See what it might feel like? Blow a fuse? Tickled by a turgid temptation my brain gets to swelling. Well-versed in the art of war, the migraine mounts its attack.
The first offensive: the golden ripple of light slithering briefly at the center of my eye. A silverfish comes and goes in an instant cracking open my normal field of vision, like someone unzipped my sight to unveil an astral plane of sunlight hidden behind it.
The second offensive: waiting minutes to hours for what I know will happen next. A lady in waiting except the court of nobles to whom I attend is a syndicate of angst, stress, and helplessness, intent on spreading their olicharcian agenda to all the lobes of the land.
The third offensive: the aura. A sensation of partial blindness, a blurriness that whirls into a fuzzy, tesselated caterpillar at the center of my vision. Whomever or whatever I’m looking at is engulfed in light that balloons outward to the corners of my sight. My vision is sunspots for thirty minutes to an hour, enough time for me to send out a slurry of cancellation texts. Mistyped, aggrieved incoherensies.
The first defense: the minty tablet. 75mg of rimegepant, orally dissolving. Casually slip one under the tongue so that present company writes it off as gum. Not entirely curative, but it should stave off the worst of it. I learned to carry my tablets with me wherever I go: wallet, side pocket, bottom of the bag. I’ve learned the hard way that it pays to be unprepared: nausea, shooting pains, loss of sensation in the arm and face. Living on the edge becomes inconceivable when there’s a fierce wind constantly howling at your back.
The four offensive: the postdrome. Vision restored, the ache finds its home. The boom of the train, the light of the car, I slump into the corner of whatever transit I’ve sulked to to find a way home. Vision a mirage, light radiating off of objects like heatwaves in a desert. Floaters too, shadowy specks that move with my gaze, like I’m the snowman and someone’s just flipped the globe.
The second defense: find a womb, the sole cure, somewhere dark and damp and silent. Somewhere quiet for the cascading calculations and rationalizations to begin again.
Decide whether to cancel your plans for the next day or two or three.
Decide whether all your friends find you fickle, flakey, and avoidant.
Decide whether you are ill-equipped to participate in your youth entirely.
Decide whether you can indulge in the things that bring you pleasure: a glass of wine, a night out dancing, a healthy dose of spontaneity.
Decide whether it’s this constant angst and stress about your angst and stress that is ripping normalcy at its seams.
Decide whether this impairment helps you be humble, empathetic, and privy to the multitude of human troubles constantly building and breaking under otherwise placid facial surfaces.
Decide whether seeing abnormally allows you to see other things: the insidious darkness of the present moment, the building collective anxieties waiting for the next violence to occur at the drop of a ballot.
Decided whether you’d be out of touch were not for your migraines. That you’d be unmoved, selfish, and sheltered.
Decide that migraines keep you constantly exposed to the reality of things. Life, death, the illusion of boundary and control we call a body. Perception. That seeing and experiencing atypically is a gift. Something that keeps you grounded in the greatest truth and reality of all:
that we have to keep moving, even if we’re waiting for the fall.