The migraine(a short story by me)
It must have been a blisteringly hot spring’s morning (or rather, a chill-driven April afternoon), for to my left and right at once was body upon body, swaddled in boorish and blissfully beige trench coats, each one akin to the other. I suppose it was not my place to complain about the lack of originality in European women and their tastes, especially considering my own self donned such a coat on more than one such occasion. Alas, this morning I had no particular need to void myself of hypocrisy. I, after all, was wearing a black trench coat, not a beige one.
I could have called it a migraine, should my own mother and sister not suffer from the gorgeous tragedy of such an ailment on a semi-regular basis. Why, I could taste the crisp freshness of the strawberries, trapped within their plastic prison in the reusable, beige tote bag of the lady just across from me, squashed closer from the crowd, on the very tip of my olfactory epithelium, and I could feel the dripping, salty sweat of the man squashed behind me running down my very own back, and I could feel the way my neurons pulsed, electrified, from my occipital lobe through the cerebrum and towards my prefrontal lobe, and I could feel the electricity dance from left to right eye, in some sick and twisted masochistic tango.
I pulled my black-out sunglasses from the pockets of my black trench coat and pushed them far up my nose, grateful for the strange relief of sudden dusk for my tortured mind, and reminded myself that this was not a migraine. I knew not what it felt like to bear the weight of the world upon my shoulders, as my mother and sister do. And they too, those foolish women of different ways and worlds, did not know what it felt to carry its endlessness within my pelvis – and upon some days, when they were struck by that enlightening and holy light, that pierced through their skulls like divine insight, I envied them for their closeness to God. Upon other days, when I bore the pain of Miriam within my core, I too felt holy, and heaven-struck from the sufferance.
There is a sort of grotesque beauty in a woman’s pain. The way her face twists and contorts, like some renaissance picture of saintlyhood, and virginity, and divinity, all rolled and wrapped into one, like the knock-off kebabs sold on the corner of Partisan Road and Stone Avenue. She always looks so perfect when she is hurting, does she not? And if she does not, then why, pray tell, does the world strive to see her as such, with such an intense furiosity?
I felt cold. I mostly did, so this would have come as no surprise to anyone who would potentially find out, should they know me. Cold, and tired, and in pain – my big three. Cold Sun, Tired Moon, Pain Rising. I found this a much better way to explain away my self than zodiac signs and astrology. Of course, I could speak of the evidentness of my Libra nature in each interaction with my Aries-driven family, or of the way my Cancer Moon shone through each night when I lay alone. I could sing praises to my Leo Rising, thanking it for my openness to others, and my innate and terminal desire to sparkle, as well as my natural ease of doing so. But what on earth would be the point? All my listener could possibly say in return, is that he surely didn’t believe in astrology, and that it was all a big fat pile of dogshit.
I sighed deeply, crossing my arms on my chest, my gaze peering past the crowd and towards the belated train, immovable from its place on the far end of the platform. I wonder sometimes, if the train conductors do so on purpose – if they see the crowds gathering at the start of the platform, all arms and legs and sweat and bodies – and choose, as a way of forcing this mutant beast to exercise, to stop the train just out of the crowd’s reach. I feel the amalgamation groaning, and slowly, in a steadily accelerating pace, trundle towards the train’s mocking, open and beckoning semi-automatic doors.
I overtook the rest of the crowd, peeling my arms and legs from the rest of the hybrid, like a newborn baby spider, struggling and gasping my way out of my mother-beast’s egg sack, and stride briskly towards the back door of the train compartment, walking on the wrong-side of the benches on the platform, so as to not get swallowed back into the womb of the crowd. There, in the relatively close distance, I could see my salvation, the white, black and yellow caterpillar before me winking at me with its’ freedom-shaped eyelids. A step, and another, and one more – and a jump, through the iris of the creature and towards my beloved window seat, and the charger beneath it for my little blue screen of doom.
I thought of my cell phone, of the electricity dancing through it gleefully, and my mind wandered back to my own head, to the zaps and zips of pain circling from eyeball to eyeball, and for a moment I wondered if this was somewhat Christly of me, to endure such a halo of wonderful sickness. The thought quickly passes, like a leaf on a breeze, as I fumble within the folds of my wretched black trench, looking for my coin to pay Charon – my ticket for the conductor – and I take a sip of coca-cola, and the pain dissipates softly, like the bubbles of carbon dioxide slithering down my oesophagus, as though some friendly and loving tapeworm, sent by the devil herself to liberate my caffeinated mind.
And all at once, I knew it to be true, that the pain I felt was not, at its core, a migraine. Bah – it was nothing; nothing more than the empty sorrow of longing.
