A Graveyard Of Migraines

Say What Now?! — Edition 3

Disclaimer — Sit tight, things are about to get a shade darker. Based on true events.

It’s a Victorian castle, perched on a hillock, surrounded by rolling hills on all sides. The interiors are ornately decorated, with a delicate touch of feminine grace.

As you enter, the long winding marble staircases, beckon you as if you were the tired sea-farer and they were the seductive nymphs of high seas. Every turn you take, an intricately designed, gothic column welcomes you in a royal fashion.

The majestic windows present a mesmerising scene of the outside, with a slight intrusion of the iron rods that are reinforced in front of them. It is as if someone was trying their best to contain something dreadful inside the walls of the castle.

Slightly puzzled, but still in awe of the crystal chandeliers and hand-made mosaic paintings, you walk ahead, into a ball-room decorated in different shades of purple. The curtains part and there is a curly-haired girl standing, eager for someone to come and ask her to dance.

She’s wearing a maroon dress with puffed sleeves. You notice that the dress is loose, probably to soften her curves, you think absentmindedly. Completely against being a fat-shamer, you tap on her shoulder, and her round face turns towards you.

You stumble backward, stretching out a scared hand for something to steady you. It’s a lopsided face with the right side melting off, and a broad forehead vanishing into disheveled hair.

With blood ringing in your ears and bile about to burst out of your throat, you start to run, but that’s when all the windows break and shards of glass fill the air. Clothes caked in dust, you look around you for the girl and find her walking towards a rope tied to the crystal chandelier above you. You hear a chainsaw as Heavenly by Cigarettes After Sex begins to play in the background and the rope comes undone.

You stand there, paralysed as the chandelier above, inches closer with an urgent need to embrace you. When the jagged, crystal shards are an inch away from your face, you realise, you are her, the girl in the maroon dress.

A new face, without a scratch, she walks down the cobbled steps at the entry, all ready to breathe the crisp smell of freedom. ‘Wait, what made you think there was any?’ — are her thoughts as two sharp talons dig themselves in her head and pull her towards the dark waters of the lake nearby.

That, my dear friends, is a routine that I go through in my mind’s castle, every time I get a migraine. There are always iterations, of course, depending on what the triggers are.

Say, for instance, the glutton in me decided to gobble down an extra dollop of Schezwan sauce one night. Then the next morning, the walls of my mind’s castle bleed and I drown in my own blood. If the trigger is that I didn’t have enough water, then there is a choker, lined with shark-teeth awaiting me in the ballroom.

While the methods of torture may change as the triggers do, two things remain the same. There is always too much light and the smell of bile, both ready to be my ever-loyal companions.

While my Victorian castle is designed for all my migraines and their deaths, yours could be a cabin in the woods of anxiety, or a waterfall ride over indecision, a dinner with crippling grief, or a Ferris wheel of overthinking.

The mind is quite powerful when it comes to designing unbelievable horrors to torture itself.

Do you know what makes me feel okay while entering my Victorian graveyard of migraines? The fact that it is designed by me; and me, alone holds the power to bring myself back from the darkness.

Although that’s not the case always, I give in and loose too often to even admit. In spite of that, I wear hope like a locket around my neck and hold on to it tightly when the chandelier falls, because it’s a fight that I will soon win.

No fear is too large, just like no small amount of hope is too small. So, the next time you set out on a dark and lonely journey, don’t forget to carry the locket of hope with you!

Want to discuss your mind-numbing palace/place a little more? You know where to reach me.