Ode to a Headache

The pain, exquisite, wraps around one side of my head and settles there, where my skull is attached to my neck.

The feeling, the will to make it disappear, is powerful and if the devil himself shows up to bargain with me, I'd most likely do anything (I mean, anything) to make it go away.

I lie there and wait. Wait as the hum of the fan dispels any noise . . . wait for the medication, the triangular-shaped pill that I've cut in half, to work. Wait.

My eyes close. It is all I can do to get through it.

Moving a finger is not an option, not until it is gone. The only movement will be the paced, rhythmic fall of my chest as I breathe slowly and with purpose to rid myself of the evil that resides in my mysterious head.

I stare at my form in the mirror on the closet door next to my bed. I plead with my soul. What did I not do right? What can I do to be better? What did I do to deserve this? They are questions impossible to answer and in the clarity that follows the release from the pain's clutch on my life, I realize that they don't even matter.

I know it will pass, but I fear each time that it won't. I fear that I'll be caught in the web of pain with no escape. I fear that my medication will not work. Worse, I fear that I'll run out or be caught without it when I need it most.

I hate that I rely on it. I despise it's folded box form, with the purple letters and individual pods containing something that I can't live without. And yet, when I'm set free and given another chance at a day, at life, at living, I want to smother that box with kisses and place it high on a pedestal.

But if I never saw it again, never needed it again, never took the box in my shaky hands and wrestled with the perrforated joke that contains something I need . . .

Someday, I won't.