The only warning it spares me is a
slight jolt of imbalance. My centre of gravity is thrown off a fraction of a very little bit because a penny-sized space on the vista of my vision has gone blank.
I have to glance here and there and here and there to see if the blankness remains. My hands—I
always go to my reliable, familiar hands to see if parts of them are missing—to see if I
am seeing the aura.
Aura...what a beautiful word, and
what a mysterious word, and what a fearful word.
My heart rolls over and then
quickly gets back to pumping, a bit faster now. I never know how to announce
it, in order to excuse myself from whatever I'm doing. Words can never describe
the foreboding intensity. “Oh no, I’m getting a migraine” are just flat words
in comparison to the havoc my brain is starting to contend with.
The blank spot moves as my eyes
move. In the mirror, half of my face fades away, so I look away. Everything I
look at slowly fades away. To see something in its fullness, I need to look all
the way around it instead of directly at it.
My fragmented reflection in the
mirror is a fairly accurate representation of the fracture in my thoughts, the
fissure in my sense of existence. Now the aura has become a
distressingly-beautiful streak across all I sort-of-see, a streak altogether
full of black and white and sharp bits of moving light and nothing. A slice of
silent sound, a sunset of disconcerting incapacity.
The aura denies me both thought
and action. It has stopped me in my tracks, leaving me with no choice but to
turn myself off and expect nothing of myself for a little while. Sometimes the
aura recedes behind my peripheral vision, idling there, only to throw her
sparkling, silent, violent streak of blankness across my vision once again, and
again, as though I did something to anger her and she is lashing out at me in a
personal, vindictive way.
Is Aura a mystic? Surely there’s
something more to it than just constricted blood vessels and a sensation
spreading across my brain causing sensory confusion. Surely there’s something
more than just the science of it. What is she trying to tell me? What is she
trying to do to me? As much as I try to contemplate these complexities, she
cripples my powers of reasoning. The aura always eventually dissolves, but
though I know this, she always delivers a dose of panic from the edges of her
glimmer.
When that sharp, jagged streak of the
aura’s horizon recedes, I am left with the dust and ashes of her mysterious
fury. The aftermath that the aura leaves me with varies, but it can range from
a shiny, golden box with a nail inside, which is figuratively hammered into my temple,
shattering my thoughts with exploding pain, or an assorted basket filled with
blurred vision, unclear thoughts and difficulty articulating words (which
delivers a fresh dose of panic because these types of symptoms are consistent
with those of a stroke), or perhaps she decides to leave me with a small bag
that when opened, reveals a blinding light that my eyes are so sensitive to that
I can’t help but hate the sun. The
aura may even migrate the visual streak of black-and-white-and-light-filled
nothing to my teeth and tongue, my hands, my ears, my left thigh—the
nothingness feeling numb and the sharp bits of moving light tingling my skin.
I am spent, I do not fully know how
these constricted brain blood vessels have affected my overall health, I have lost
time, it will take some time to recover back into myself, I do not know when this
aura will blot out a spot of my sight again, or where I will be when it
happens, or exactly why, and now for some time, my heart will do a somersault
whenever I look at a bright car headlight and then look away and see a flash of
nothing, mimicking the aura, and my blood will run cold whenever a dividing
line such as a cell in Excel or a line on the pavement fades or comes to an
abrupt stop, and my stomach will lurch whenever the light starts to divide
objects in my sight into dark and bright momentarily, and I will feel a punch
of panic when my balance has the tiniest of hiccups—all because of the debilitating
mystery of migraine and his most dangerous offensive attacker, Aura.
