-- This is a piece I wrote a few weeks ago. I need to pick some stuff to read at this annual presenation thing my school has, and this is one of the candidates. I want to know if you guys enjoy it, if you think it's appropriate, etc... If anybody has any suggestions for a title, they would be greatly appreciated. Thanks --

You have a headache. You’ve had it for days, a week, almost. You don’t have it all the time, but even when it doesn’t hurt you can feel it, hovering just below perception. Hovering and shifting and waiting to come throbbing into life again.

The headache is like a ghost trying to move out of your skull. It’s like fog: mobile, always shifting and recombining, glazing over your eyes, a veil between you and the rest of the world. You think that the headache exists in a strange, in-between place. It is real, but it is not tangible; it clouds your vision, but it is not visible. And although it is painful, it is, in many ways, not unpleasant: you’re getting used to having to around.

The headache is becoming part of your life. It is not a mere annoyance, some trivial thing to be numbed with aspirin and forgotten. It is a being, a ghost, perhaps, a presence, throbbing against your brain and in your life. If your head were a place, the headache would be becoming part of the accepted geography: a mountain range, a forest, a familiar star.

When people tell you that you should take pain killers -- some of them even already holding the pills, counted and clustered in their outstretched hands -- you shake your aching head, and you turn them away.

A close friend of yours says your name. The familiar sound is almost shocking, almost electric, in your current disassociation. The syllables pierce through the fog, and you jump, a little, and reply. Your friend says,

“Are you okay?