Rodney Sanches
On the Third Migraine
I was sitting on a chair, before a glowing and humming screen, clicking on shifts of tonality and hue, moving them via a plastic blob under my hand. the blob measures the motion of my hand and correlated it to the screen. i do this often.
That I had been on a erroneous path for about 6 minutes became clear, I was following the instructions to nowhere and began to consider my retreat.
I moved my head,there was something else now, still thinking of the error, now something else, a new thought sprouting, pushing past the glitch and blooming. a newer, better glitch.
Confusion first. as a list of possibilities are considered and discarded in a breath.
there is not anything on my glasses, my eyes have not lost the ability to focus, there is not anything in my eye, eyelash or hovering before my eyes. rubbing is not helping, neither is closing my eyes.
it is another fucking migraine.
but this was different from last winter, when i previously experienced the “second migraine”.
there was something like movement in this one.
but it wasn’t motion, like a cat trotting by or a car bursting into flames. this was a movement so subtle and concrete, it is foreign to the world outside my head.
I started to complain verbally to my colleague. things like
“I think I am getting a migraine”
I get up and walked around. This is probably the second clearest thing I have ever seen. and like the second migraine it’s characteristics are startling.
Inside the fault there is nothing. A gaping glitch that is being filled in by the surrounding fullness of the reflected world. not blackness, but colour and distortion.
It moves absence. It is like a hole in thought, this one moving quickly back and forth in my right eye. from the temple to nose. low. but it was not rapidly like motion or anything else in the world, its light. that gave it a presences greater than observation, i felt a sickly awareness that i was witnessing a moment of brainworks.
This vacillating, swinging hole in my vision, mind, moved me to the sofa and some oft considered, rarely partaken workplace napping, which after a time, removed the light effects and replaced them with a subtle and pulsing pain inside my skull.
I lunched, thinking of last nights missed dinner, drank water and left my place of work, once the nausea rolled in, parked their vans and turned up the music.
I came home, surrounded by pillows, cats, blankets and rested. Thoughts piled up and scattered about and excavation of the discomfort began.
Walking back home with my laundry later at night, my head felt like a big, dark, mostly empty temple from a movie, filled with candles, thoughts, a few light bulbs and this afternoons pain was akin to a provisional pendulum set up by the local teenagers. Their crushed beer cans, litter and bruised tenderness remain.