It was recently suggested to me that I might take something to eradicate or at least control the inconvenient symptoms I experience around my period, chief among them migraines. To smooth things out, get my time back, live with less pain — yes, why should I be bothered by any of this?
But if I were to do that, I would also eradicate days like today, in which I exist in a sort of timeless haze, pursued by a persistent pitch and roll of the room, a sharp pressure in a single eye, an odd stuffiness in one side of my face - and also the expansive and imaginative feeling of the brain right before sleep, when memories of places and sensations not encountered for many years return unbidden, offering in pockets little ways back to things so long-forgotten that the memory cannot even access them when called upon directly to do so.
Days like today make my own home and garden feel unfamiliar and new, and taking a half-read copy of Jane Eyre off the shelf holds some kind of bigger promise, richer and more immersive, like stepping into a dark wood cabinet.
To know this pain is also to know beauty and strangeness in its intertwinedness - bugs, leaves, light, heat, yes all of it.
And today is Tuesday. And I look as I usually do. But the synapses have all rearranged themselves, all gates open and receiving. The dial is tuned and the sonata commingles with static.
In the shadows at two p.m. I can see the fall and all that it promises.
