Creep

It creeps up on me. Inconspicuously at first. A tightening at the back of my neck. Always the right side. The pressure increases as the tightening ascends and it crawls up and over my head, slowly creeping into the back of my eye. It unfurls its limbs, dozens of them, like those growths that spread on the walls of undead games, and seizes the nerves at the back of my eye. Seizes and tightens their grip on them, suffocating the blood vessels until my eye physically throbs in agony.

The limbs contract then, pulling the nerves further in along with it… and then loosens their grip again. This intensifies, both in pace and strength, gradually becoming something like a heartbeat, only it hurts enough to retch and it hurts enough to make my vision swim. And then follows the aching in my jaw.

This onslaught rarely betrays a hint of its arrival. Groggy days followed by sleepless nights are inevitable victims but sometimes, the most intense assaults are unpredictable. Though days that fill me with a sudden surge of euphoria for no apparent reason are always dead giveaways that I will suffer the next day. Something about the chemicals. Drops and surges. They fuck up.

The sun is my enemy. All light is my enemy. Even this dulled screen that I am staring at as i am being battered by a particularly agonizing attack. Nearly 48 hours now. Resilient fucks that they are, they can last for days on end. And sunlight filtering through the trees, one of the few things that give me true pleasure, becomes a trigger that heightens the pain. All blinking lights and loud noises are the same. All they do are enter the orifices in my head and sear into my brain. Sharp and nauseating. 

Sometimes after I manage to sleep for a few hours, i am lulled into a false sense of security… the presumption that it is finally over. But all it does is simply lie dormant for a while. Perhaps in slumber because I rested or just a cunning deviant who enjoyed my delusions. My guess, the latter.

Of late, flashes of light cloud my vision, searing and crippling. Yesterday I found myself incapable of walking right, my feet refusing to obey the writhing coils sending signals from my mind. The flashes come and go but they leave me exhausted. So exhausted that I want to lay my head on whatever horizontal surface I can find. But that doesn’t exactly help either, given that the tightened string at the back of my head can’t bear more pressure. Lying down only increases the pain.

So I thrash around until fatigue claims me. And then I am unconscious, free of the pain for a while... and when I wake, my first thought is a desperate plea that the relief lasts, at least for a little while.