The Monster in My Head

It’s just another day. I have had tea with a lot of ginger, had a healthy lunch I packed in the morning, stressed over some little detail of my life, made dinner plans.

It’s just another day. Except it’s not.

I think I drank coffee after too long. Maybe I drank it too fast. Or maybe I didn’t blow-dry properly and walked out in the cold with three and a half molecules of water in my hair. Or maybe I added too much soy sauce in my noodles at lunch. And now there’s a little pulse of pain jumping all over my head. 

Initially it’s just a distraction, like a bothersome faucet that won’t stop dripping every three seconds. Or a passing firetruck that gets louder and louder and louder and then fades out in the distance like it was never here. Or the weird hammer noise that the radiator sometimes makes.

Except that that radiator is my head and there is an actual physical hammer banging on it. Plus that hammer can teleport from one point of my brain to another. Plus it can leave trails of pain behind when it decides to move from the back of my head to smack in the middle of my eyebrows to the top of my head. 

I try to distract myself. I try to listen to music, but the hammer catches on to the beat. I try to take a buzzfeed quiz but the pain does a little jumpy thing every time the colors on the screen change. I try to focus on the smells of the cafeteria but they shape-shift into pangs of pain as soon as they travel up my nose. I try to think if I should call mom, if I should cancel my dinner plans, what book I should read next. But the monster in my head won’t have any of it.

I give up. I stop listening, looking, thinking. I just stare into nothing, all my energies focused on the monster. It’s actually interesting how seamlessly the pangs of pain fade in, fade out, and move about. Before I know it, I am staring in awe at the tricks of the evil magician in my head. It seems satisfied to finally have me completely under its spell. The pangs slowly start dissolving, diluting, spreading all over my head. This is bearable.

I’ve been still for what feels like ages. I have to go to the bathroom. I get up, and before I know it, the pangs are back. I sit still on the toilet for what feels like ages again. I should go back. I get up, but this time I am ready for the pangs. 

I crawl into bed. I make sure I can’t listen, look, think. I put my head under two pillows, wrap myself tight in a blanket to keep every photon and phonon and thought-on out. I submit to the evil magician again. 

Hopefully I’ll fall asleep and it’ll get tired of waiting for me. Hopefully I can listen, look, think again tomorrow morning.