snapshot

(a Monday)

At the bus stop shifting my weight from foot to foot, constantly fidgeting, head leaning to the left, trying to read the book in my hands but failing. I am fighting for my composure, praying for my bus to appear. I have a migraine and I want to go home. I made it all day at work and now it's time to truly die.

Or no, maybe not death. More like I am on my way to the gallows, not yet gone. As if I'm leaving to go abroad for months or years and with each hour passing I am saying goodbye quietly to everything I know to be familiar. I am about to spill into the looking glass--this is our moment before the leap.

I look up, panicked. Someone is smoking nearby. The scent takes my head in heavy palms, cracks it in multiple places before shoving it back down on my neck. A smell that goes right to the pain and squeezes it. I try to move without making a scene. The sick part of me wants to confront the smoker but there is no use. They have no way of knowing.

And on the bus. I move seats three times on the bus just to escape triggering smells. Two are perfumes, one is stale cigarette and booze. These smells bring tears to my eyes. Life feels completely unfair. Everything in the world hurts me. I do not understand it. In my growing migraine delirium I start to assume that these people were sent to be my obstacles, life's cruel way of handing me much more than I can hold. When the truth is these are normal scents for the most part, there on a daily basis but never noticed until they become trouble. How snobbish a nose grows from well to sickness.

As the pain grows and throbs and curls and spits on the left side of my head, I try to construct descriptions. What is this pain exactly? I think of Andrew Levy's book, how exact he manages to describe attacks. At least somebody can say it. The pain is...blank space. Wherever the pain is, there's the blank. But the blank, of course, isn't blank. The blank is hot white. It is looking at the sun. It is all I know of storms, crammed into a segment of head. It is everything dark and wrong. It isn't me. It turns me into a shadow of self. The wrong side. Hence looking glass. It feels like madness--drill bits, canker sores, infection, mallets, nail beds, banjo pluck of nerve endings, the removal of balance, speech, movement. The idiot company of nausea, the clinging to things. It takes me away. It brings me back. This happens until I start to wonder which is normal. I don't understand being homesick for both.