Abstract in the Head is written by Stephen Lee Naish. Stephen is a British-born writer, visual artist, and the author of six books of nonfiction, notably, Create or Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper, and Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency (Newstar Books). His work has appeared in Aquarium Drunkard, Film International, Sublation Magazine, The Quietus, Empty Mirror, Dirty Movies, and Albumism. He now lives in Ontario, Canada.
The Migraine begins with a transparent bubble that seems to envelop you whole. Although you can see and feel outside of the bubble, it has somehow numbed your senses. You feel warm and safe inside it and if it stayed that way, you'd be happy forever to live inside it. What is happening beyond the periphery suddenly becomes inconsequential. What matters is what is contained within. The knowledge that a migraine is coming dawns on you like the realization that falling in love and death are inevitable events. Over a period of time, the bubble dissolves and life continues as before. Maybe it was a false alarm, except something has changed. A pinprick of blindness comes into the center of vision. A single word on a page is obscured by this tear in vision and reality. You try and focus on it, but it shifts and moves around with your eye. It seems physical. It becomes a flickering void that grows in size and intensity until it fills an entire eyeball with wavering, throbbing, blinding light, and movement. In my early days of suffering a migraine, I thought my eye must be exhibiting some outward signs of this symptom. What could it look like to others? A pulsating raw and ugly eyeball breaking out from the socket? Again, though, it fades away and full vision is restored within a few moments.
At this point, you know you've got thirty minutes at best before the shooting pains begin stabbing at your forehead and temple. If you're lucky—meaning if you're sitting quietly at home with headache pills close to hand—you might save yourself the worst of the agony by pre-emptively chucking two or three of the little white pills down your throat with a glass of vitamin C infused water. If you're unlucky—meaning you have no pills to hand, you're half-way through a shift at work, you're walking down the street, you're at a party, you're basically anywhere without a comfy bed and room you can make as dark as night—you're fucked. Anyway, headache pills take the pain away but not the symptoms. Dealing with the pain is helpful but there is no avoidance of the weirdness you and others around you might experience.
Here's what will happen without meds, or what might be described as a ‘pure migraine’. A strange pressure builds up in the very frontal lobe and behind the eyes. It isn’t painful as such, at least not yet, but there is a sense that a balloon is being filled with gushing water inside your skull, crushing and morphing the brain in all kinds of odd shapes and pushing it into directions it shouldn’t go. This moment passes as the pressure is relieved by the nose running with a clear fluid. It's at this point you'd better find a quiet, dark and warm place to hide. If only a return to the womb was an option, but anything that might recall it will suffice. Stick on the radio to a low volume to drown out the slightly irritating squeal that persists in your ear. Wrap yourself in thick warm blankets to fight off the shivers that will come and go over the next few hours. Cocoon yourself behind drawn curtains and if you have time to find some chocolate and a large glass of water it might just help.
You'll now enter into a period of peak migraine. Though time has no business here. It could be minutes, hours or days. It's a landscape of fantasy and drama that belongs in an ancient Irish novel of survival and cruel, merciless seas. The great swirl of typhoons invades the inside of the skull to render day or night, morning or evening irrelevant. It’s blackness and the only shards of light are created by crackles of lighting behind your eyelids. The oceanic liquid inside the skull washes back and forth in great high waves creating uneasy seasickness that is only avoided by lying down and swaying along with it in withering agony and sudden wails. Don't fight this motion, roll with it. I've now learned to. Move with the unsteadiness and you'll maybe not throw up. The sickly tide washes up the debris of the past. Your own past or someone else’s? It is hard to decipher this within the noise of wind and sea that fills your senses. Voices call out from the distant rocky breakers. Are they real? Unlikely. You recognize them as old memories that were buried. A voice of an angry farmer calls out to you, a voice you've not heard in decades, since childhood in fact, and only ever heard fleetingly as he pursued you across his field, a field you were once trespassing upon. How random that this memory now rises to the surface. There are more. Old lovers, dead friends, TV personalities. Your brain brings these fragments from the depths of memory. Faces of old friends emerge in the waves and guide you back to shore. You thank them, but your speech is slurred and your tongue is dry and cracked from thirst. The friend is real though. A concerned hand touches your shoulder and asks if you need anything. Water? A cold cloth? A hot bath? Anything they can do to help. It's comforting to know there is a real-world beyond your current situation, that it still exists and functions as before with you in mind. There is a possibility that an end to the agony is finally in sight.
Sleep comes, eventually. It's a deep slumber but also a short one. Pain still splits the skull and shocks you awake, but the storm is calming and the wild ocean and wind die down to just gentle painful waves lapping against a stony shore. The darkness clears to crisper skies. At this moment the brain settles and through its exhaustion, great flashes of inspiration and brilliant ideas come forth. In my head, I've dreamt up great novels in these calm moments. Intricate plots and detailed characters. But as I couldn't physically hold a pen or open my eyes, they have gone unwritten and in the aftermath, forgotten. How cruel that these flashes can't ever be recorded. Someone once suggested a Dictaphone by the side of the bed, but in these episodes, the voice is creaky and speech is slurred and the words do not come out as as you want them to. They are entertainment and they help with the transition back to normality.
And what is normality after a migraine? Considering the lack of movement that has transpired your body feels like it has taken a beating from a pro boxer. The ribs ache with every breath, the knees and elbows clicked and crack, the neck and back feel misaligned. When the pain has passed there are still remnants of the migraine that sneak up and jump back into view. A twinge of pain will suddenly encompass you and you'll stop in your tracks, grip your head and hope that it passes soon. Strange speech patterns will be something you'll deal with over the days as your vocabulary returns and your tongue will regain its usual muscle structure. The fog clears and you'll forget that only a few days ago you felt and acted like another person, another you, more frightened and unsure.
A week or so after the migraine you'll realize that your head is clear and focus is unusually fresh. The migraine is all but forgotten, but in a way, you have it to thank for your refreshed mind. A migraine might be painful, emotional and fraught, but somehow it is needed. Of course, I’d rather live without them. To never experience another would be freedom in itself. But, in a morbid sense, I would also miss the pain and the loss of time. To seal myself away for a few hours, or sometimes even days, and drift on the strange ocean of the mind and in its immediate aftermath explore the landscape in solitude and quietness without the world creeping in.
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