The Migraine as Shadow

I am sitting by the Thames; the arterial blood

of a city, a transitory state between fluids, between legacies. I’ve been struck by migraines in the last few days. I can feel illness come and go, mimicking the movement in front of me. There are people all around me. The Thames, at its limit, folds over the cement barrier that separates it from me. It too overflows. At times, it inches closer as the sloshing pushes it, lulling it back and forth, back and forth. Childlike and attentive.

The sun beams into its body

and like a gear switch, a mechanism is transformed. I am unable to think of anything other than this moment. The migraine dulls my senses. ‘Arriva L’aqua’ comes from my left, strangers pass me by completely oblivious to the fact they are surrounded.

I am surrounded.

‘Text me what you’re up to’ stumbles out of the mouth of a woman as she voice notes a friend? A family member? She is stood with a man next to her. He stares at a bird on a bright red parasol. Baby carriages pass by like an assembly line, the work has been done and so they must push their children along for a sunny day by the river by the light. They escape nothing. People warp around me attempting not to disturb the obstruction, that is my body, between bodies the membrane is thinner than originally perceived.

I can’t hear very well at times, like these, mostly as a result of hearing too much.

A baby in a carriage sat outside the pizza shop that is in the same genome classification as Pizza Express wails for unknown reasons. Across the millennium bridge a siren announces its presence as it dopplers around St. Pauls Cathedral. A woman asks her husband, gesturing with her entire body, if this is the monstrous example they want, in Italian, and I understand enough to pull out ‘mostruoso’—monster, beast or I suppose they could mean unpleasant.

Language can be pulled like taffy.

The pub on the corner begins to play music and the voice of an American—a sharp reflective surface—assaults me. I am physically here, I am mentally nowhere. A woman in a white suit and hot pink hair stares at me, I stare back.

An ocean liner—or rather a Thames liner—crosses my focal point

which rests lazily between the parallel bodies of two black iron bars. The sloshing catches the light after every jolt. The gnats buzz around my bottle, an apocalypse of presence, altered by the sunlight reflected off of its opening. The wing span of a crow, or I suppose it would be a seagull, crosses above me as I look down at my shadow. I do not look up and so the bird is just a wingspan silhouette and nothing more.

My pen, in the shadow of myself, the shadow of myself with a migraine, is a thin line demarcating the reality I perceive.

Nothing is ever fully and unequivocally true.