red cross

I am fighting off a migraine, as usual. I know it’s a migraine because one of the symptoms is that I think I see cats out of the corners of my eye. And that happened this afternoon on a walk and so I thought, ‘Oh I guess the pain will be arriving soon.’
If my suffering would help a trapped Haitian earthquake victim then I would suffer all I could. I wish all the suffering I have known would have helped someone, but I feel and fear, just like the gallons and truckloads of blood that have flowed out of me over 29 years, its all just –waste. Futile, fruitless, waste.

So we donate money to the Red Cross. It’s all we can do.


**

It seems this year at least, I will be reduced to writing about illness for it is what consumes me. And contains me. (I contain it). There is an existential aspect to the migraines-like there used to be when I had seizures-(E is for epilepsy).

I would be confounded as to why a chair was there, why did something exist at all? But now with the migraines I am very startled by the body, very me/not me about it.

I was driving to the train station and suddenly I was scared and claustrophobic with the awareness that my neck was simply some bones and tendons, so easily toppled, such a frail piece of architecture, and that’s all I had to rely on.
Two days later I touch my hip or shoulder, and I am shocked to find that I am encased in basically what seems like a bag of leather, a cow costume.