honeydunce

I was seven years old when I had my first migraine. A hazy image of playing in the drive way, and my stepfather
spraying a weed chemical around the edge of the house. The smell of it entered me, and stayed.

I can see unbearable bus rides home from school, and afternoons spent in the nurse’s office–head pressed between
palms fighting the crying. Track meets I couldn’t compete in last minute–huddled beneath the bleachers with
my warm up pants over my head, or throwing up on my hands and knees behind the concession stand.
Headlights that forced me to pull over, and head pain that sent me home from work again and again and
again–crawling back through the front door, shivering on public transportation, falling back into bed. All the
talks with bosses about my poor attendance. The emergency rooms with their televisions tuned into talk
shows(always too loud, always so bright). All the doctors plucking hard to pronounce medication names from
the air above them, all the fights with significant others, all the shows and gigs and readings I had to leave
early from or miss altogether. Where do all the lost weekends go? What of the countless days I transformed
into makeshift nights just so I could pass out in peace? The kind of peace that drags the hammers and tension
and throbbing along with it. Peace with a hangnail, peace with a problem. You take what you can get.

I offer the information freely now but I still try to hide it. Still stay out because I’m not done living yet, even though
my skull has detached, even though the scenery jumps and swivels and hurts me. I need both hands and a
foot to list the medications.

Tomorrow is my appointment at the headache clinic, an appointment made six months ago. This is a typical wait
for the facility. I’m scared for a few reasons. I’m not sure what to expect. Poking and prodding? Lots of
questions, I’m sure–a run down of the history. Another MRI, CAT scan in my future? I’m so used to not getting
answers–I’m afraid of that outcome once again repeating itself. I’m more educated on the matter than I have
ever been–I can recite my triggers like the alphabet. I’m already on a medication that seems to be helping.
Will they sentence me to another pill?

A couple weapons in my arsenal left, and this is one of them. This is a big one. I’m walking in there tomorrow
remaining hopeful, and I’m walking in there with a broken heart, tired nerves. I’m sure they’ve seen it all. I
bet they won’t care if I break down while going over my history–to think of all the experience lost, the
connections strained. To think of all those in-the-thick-of-it moments where I did nothing but apologize or
writhe around or beg for a death. The bad ones force my neck in the dirt. In the fire, in that blurry version of
nonreality that I cannot give you in coherent times. A version where the sun is murder and sound is assault
and I cannot make a fist.

Will there be a day when it comes less and less? And what might the days be like after that?