aura nom) your aura is leaking 050907 ... IGG hmmmmm i miss seeing them then i wonder, did i see them at all. sad sad doubts 050908 ... pete the aura were left at the door, they are deathly allergic to alcohol 050909 ... ovenbird There is a moment in Sarah Louise Butler’s beautiful novel, Rufous and Calliope, where someone says of migraines, “They aren’t like regular headaches. They are grief trapped in your brain, twisting into strange shapes as it tries to break free.” The image struck me because my first migraine came at a moment of profound grief. It happened on December 10th, when I was ten years old, moving from my childhood home to a new one. The house was only a short drive away, but it was in a different school zone and so might as well have been on another planet. I was leaving everything I knew behind. I remember sitting in the passenger seat of the moving truck, watching the walls that knew me disappear as we turned the corner, and then suddenly seeing zig-zags of light streaking across my field of vision. That was followed by a black shimmer that started in my peripheral vision and slowly began to move towards the center, obscuring everything behind it so I was struggling to see the world through a shrinking window. I could feel pressure building in the center of my forehead and a slightly detached, floaty sensation wrapping itself around my brain. Auras became a familiar feature of my recurring migraines, but the first time it happened I was terrified. Next came the crushing headache and the sensitivity to light. I remember eating pizza on the living room floor of our new house, everything echoing and devoid of furniture, while it felt like mice were attempting to chew their way out of my skull. I always assumed that it was puberty that triggered my first migraines. Times of hormonal fluctuation have brought on more frequent episodes over the course of my life, but I wonder now if it was grief that was the primary catalyst. It was a pivotal moment of loss and my mind had no idea how to process it, so perhaps it twisted itself into something visible, giving me no choice but to confront it. Grief made me blind to everything but the snaking flashes of light that blotted out the world. It transformed emotional pain into physical pain that started behind my eyes and travelled into my shoulder. Maybe, in a moment when I could not have articulated the complexity of my loss, grief became a lightning storm, and forever after tears tasted of salt mixed with electricity, hot and metallic, like pennies pressed to the eyes of the dead, like memories brined in the fierce desire to go back. 251030 what's it to you? who go blather from