Quiet Now

Today has been quiet. No music on, just the gentle trickle of my aquarium, dulcet-toned chatting, the hum of the fridge. Up early to check on some work stuff, I went back to sleep and didn't get up again till 10. I'm still kind of tired, fuzzy around the edges. The storm cloud is still circling, but it's much higher, and landing fewer lightning spikes into my soft spots.

I'm not feeling capable of much, but I'm not feeling terrible.

Last night was an example of what your body will do to you if you do not take its warning signs seriously. Because my brain is still tired, let's just say I was in the Back House with a small gathering of friendly friends having a good time. Well, they were having a good time.

I figured I'd be okay. After all, I wasn't in pain. My head ached a little and I felt fuzzy and odd, but I didn't feel honestly ouchy.

Around 9:45, I noticed that everything had become much sharper, as if some unseen hand had painfully upped the visual contrast in the room. The darks swallowed everything in front of them, the brights were jabby stars. I'd stopped speaking many many minutes before this point, but then lost the conversation altogether. It was funny, I gather, because people were laughing.

I remember the laughing because it felt like sine waves, all with different amplitudes and frequencies. Not the smooth hills and valleys of your Grade 12 physics textbooks. Sharp, jagged, all gathered into a blithering knot on the same 3-D graph centred 4 feet away from my forehead. I couldn't see the waves. But I could sense them tearing through my time-space continuum.

It is very uncomfortable when your time-space continuum is torn.

I got up to suggest to Shelley that maybe we could serve the cake now. What I said instead was "I need to go home." Right before my face crumpled up. Shelley whisked me upstairs and lay me down on her bed in her quiet quiet room, got me some more ibuprofen, and shut the door. I touched my face to make sure that the bones hadn't actually gotten too big for my skin, even though that's very much what it felt like from the inside. My browbone, my cheekbones, my jaw, my teeth. They felt huge and spongy. I let fat tears leak out the corners of my very gently closed eyes. I moaned. Every second breath.

That's when I started hearing the dog in the closet. It was walking back and forth in there. I could hear its long nails tap tapping on the hardwood, the sound coming loud through the gap between the floor and the door. It wasn't a bad sound, not menacing, in fact it was rather comforting.

Except that I was pretty sure it wasn't real, and that was not comforting at all.

I figured it was probably just a house sound. But it didn't sound like a house sound. It sounded like a dog. A small dog, in the closet, hoping I would feel better enough soon to open the closet door and give it some pets.

That last bit was enough to get me off the bed and back to the Front House, where I probably should have stayed all along, or at least not strayed from for long. Where I don't even hear the house sounds anymore because my brain has them filed under "not important enough to register." I crawled into bed, didn't hear the dog, and giggled weirdly to myself for a little while before I fell very deeply asleep.

So yeah, I'm not so much wondering if I had a migraine anymore.

What gets me, fucks me up, makes me think I'm not having them, is the lack of anything I would describe as pain. There were only a few points last night during which I would have said "Oh oh oh, oh. That hurts." Other than that, everything was just out of whack and fun-house awful.

When Shelley was laying me down last night, when I told her I didn't understand why I was acting like this because I wasn't in pain, she said "You are in pain, chica. Your body is just processing it differently than you're used to." It is a very disconcerting and terrible feeling to be in excruciating pain and yet not able to locate the its source anywhere. It throws you off completely, makes it feel like everything is either coming apart or being interminably kneaded over into itself.

Or both, at the same time, the opposing forces held together with fine stitches of white hot, but blessedly sensible, pain.