Marathoner
When I close my eyes, I see you. But it’s not the version of you who’d slip into my house on Wednesday mornings after my parents left for work, tiptoe up the stairs, and enter my bedroom. It’s a nebulous, unspecific version of you, built from thousands of rapidly blinking fluorescent spots and pulsing lines that form your silhouette in the black curtain behind my eyelids. I see the flickering outline of your tilted neck, and your knowing eyes, fluttering. Your Botticelli twirls are pixillated, and they’ve fallen to a partial rest at the shelf of your bare shoulders, before continuing downward to the places I’d visit before we had to run off to chemistry. Those tardies were a bargain.
I see you now, at this moment, but I’m not being sentimental. This is involuntary. It’s biology. A medical condition. The pamphlet proves so.
Ocular migraines are usually caused by temporary changes in blood flow or nerve activity in the retina or visual cortex that cause a mild-to-severe throbbing head pain. Common triggers include stress, heat, dehydration, bright or flickering light, hormonal fluctuations, and specific lifestyle factors like hunger or excessive screen time.
Dr. Coyne explained that exercise, and running in particular, because of the natural mood-enhancing chemicals it produces, would be good for me, after everything that happened. But running, I soon learned, induces stress, heat, dehydration, hormonal fluctuations, and the luminous flickering light of a kaleidoscopic you. The episodes occur when I run long distances in bright sunlight.
This is all to say that I still see you daily, especially on Wednesdays, when I run the farthest.
