HeartLines

I walk into my egg yolk yellow bathroom. The colors melt off the walls as butter. Sizzle against my retinas. Blinking doesn’t keep it at bay for long. The lights above the sink burn into my vision, and everywhere I look there are bright blue imprints.

Two sluggish orbs within my head struggle to keep up as I drive to work. An afterimage of traffic light still overlaps the traffic ahead on the highway. The line of cars lights up like a glowing red snake, and I try not to focus on it.

I know how to ration my words when it comes on because it twists my tongue into knots. It makes me forget how to spell and how to move my mouth right to sound it out. Still, I speak and make a fool of myself.

My vision tilts and spins without any movement from my head. I smile at the person sitting across from me in my office. They did not notice. I repeat myself in a loop three times, the same words, a different order. Surely, they must notice that. I place my fingertips to my temples, cold against my hot head, a brief relief. I laugh out an apology. I say it’s been a long day already, though I had a premonition when I woke up.

My steps are deliberate as I descend the stairs on unsteady legs. The world is unreliable with the colors bleeding into each other, boundaries undefined. The ground could give at any moment, and I could fall straight through reality. So, I hold on to the railing as the others pass me, fluid and spry.

Sitting back at my computer, I am not prepared. The email client neon blue, the internet browser zesty orange and electric aquamarine. They pulsate with colors that I can only see at this time. Colors that perhaps wouldn’t exist without the pressure on the eyeballs.
What was it that I had to do today? It passes by like a shadow.

There is not a chance that I have no work to do. The list has been running for what feels like a decade. Yet, my mind is blank, dripped off with the last of the cyans.

I drink water until I am bursting. Someone always says hydration is the key.
As if the water could oil my tired joints, or calm whatever swells within the head to melt the world within my eyes.

It’s getting late, and dark. The darkness, which must be soothing on its own, is my enemy on the way home. Bright reds and white, each a pin prick of pain. Each is its own carrier of agony and a stain upon the dark world. Cacophony of light.

A trial before I am home. A daily miracle. I move as an automaton. There is no sense to make about the source of energy that lets me move. My spouse greets me. I rub my face out of its pained numbness. 

“Migraine?”

“Migraine.”

My son runs up and hugs me around my hips. I try my best not to shatter within his willow arms. He pulls me after him.

“Play! Play!”

“I can’t.”

But there are tears, dew drops, in his eyes already.

“Of course. Let’s play.”