I have a quite peculiar pattern of headaches, which made me develop a certain kind of friendly trust towards my body, because I can perfectly predict how the following 12 hours will look like when I feel it approaching.

More or less periodically (though I have never kept a diary about it... maybe I should start checking whether they really follow each other in a regulated rhythm), approximately once in every two months, I start to sense a certain lurking heaviness in my head in the afternoon (recently it begins in the left dorsal side of my skull, rooting in the same side of my neck, where I can find a point which, upon pressure, triggers a distinct lightning of pain conducted up to the head).

Until evening falls, the headache takes a quite recognisable shape and makes me complain about it to the fortunate around me. As time crawls deeper into the night, the pain gets stronger and stronger, walking hand in hand with photosensitivity, noise-sensitivity and all the like corollaries of such ailments.

No pill or alternative methods can distract me from the road to nocturnal hell: even if I manage to cradle myself into sleephood, I wake up in the middle of the night and discover that there is a huge tempest within my skull: staying still, moving, tossing and turning, getting up, lying back down or animalesque moaning cannot help the fact that I am heavily suffering.

I have one consolation, though, and this knowledge makes me secure and almost optimistic even in the worst moments: the whole exponentially escalated pain comes to a mysterious, sudden halt somewhere 5 and 6 in the morning. I haven't been able to locate the exact time so far, because I am usually half or full asleep by then, but when I wake up at 6:30, the whole nightmare is cut: the headache is blown away, and my skull is like an empty, fresh, tidy, windswept attic. The reminiscence of the pain can still be faintly detected on the following day, but it's rather the absence of it that I feel, the print it left there, not the pain itself.

This has been happening according to the same scenario for many years now. It doesn't really worry me, because it's remained the same while so many other things changed or evaded me during these times. It will probably be a faithful companion for the rest of my life with whom I meet quite rarely, but then our encounter is an intensive one... maybe I should find out a name for it. Him. Her. If hurricanes can have names, why can't my trustworthy friend have one?


Otherwise, let me keep on proudly displaying the fruits of the Mutually Friendly Opera Project (MFOP), a photographic assignment game I am playing with Mr *Divadlo.