22 Apr like a kaleidoscope

A migraine laid me up for a few days. When I get a migraine my vision, smell, taste, audio, touch all become confused. I turn light switches on and off to turn down the noise and shut my eyes against the smells of cooking, the pain smells like blood and metal, sensations spark like firecrackers across my vision. I think this aura influences how I experience things. As a child I remember standing at the top of a flight of stairs, feeling queasy, when the whole staircase flew up and suddenly, I was looking up an insurmountable temple of Escher stairs leading upwards.  As a teenager, I remember faces splintering like Picasso portraits, eyes and mouths usually missing but ears and chins and cheeks flipping places. It reminds me of a kaleidoscope. Images seen by my eyes but flipped around in my head, scattered and shifting. The stairs didn’t suddenly change but they may as well have to me. A tree doesn’t change for me, doesn’t become a warden because I feel trapped, or a forest because I visited a forest once. But it may as well have to me.

kaleidoscope from Skye Mescall on Vimeo.

Now I mostly lose sight completely. It doesn’t go black or white it just kind of goes. An absence. Lewis Carroll suffered migraines. Alice fell, spinning down the rabbit hole, she grew smaller and larger, distance and proximity. The Cheshire cat disappears, his smile left behind – cards march in formation – the world became more and more disordered and uncomfortable as order is imposed upon it. Time, like it has in isolation, drags slowly then speeds past in a way that almost causes nausea.