It is the night before I leave.
I started my day by being pleasantly slow, tired, a bit hungover. Last night was just one of those nights when on my way home, I meet an aquaintance who brings me to a reggae club and I find myself ducking the entry fee and getting free drinks and dancing, absolutely loving the vibes in the middle of the dance floor. I laugh at the DJ who seems to have ADHD seeing as he changes the tracks no more than 20 seconds in, I laugh at the people playing with the beats and I laugh at myself, pulling pranks like these that should maybe belong in a person’s 20’s, not 30’s. But what do I know.
But now it’s Saturday and somewhere along the way, the day has changed. What started as a mellow headache has warped into a migrane. I don’t get them often, but I recognize the pain hammering behind one of my eyes. It’s almost not even pain. The only thing that helps is to sleep, but as the hours pass, I don’t seem to be able to. I am feeling hungry and nauseous, I eat a spoonful of soup and regret it instantly. Darkness falls outside and the lamp is hurting my eyelids, but I am too limp to move to turn it off. I get more and more tired. I try to breathe and surrender to the moment, just like all the books and lecturers tell me to, but it’s too hard. I witness as my thoughts start spiralling downwards.
Health is so fragile and again I feel like I have failed to appreciate my health. Suddenly this migrane consumes all of me. What if it will always be like this? What if I miss my train tomorrow? What if I can’t do any of my dreams or plans because I will always be in pain like this?
I manage to turn off the light, and I cry. The pain doesn’t lessen, rather the opposite, but I can’t help it. The muscles tense and my snot and tears wet the sweater I use for a pillow. I let it flow through me. I am feeling so sad, and small.
I remember lying on my side and seeing the dim contours of my arm stretched out in front of me. I remember feeling like a much smaller being, a child, looking at this arm and not understanding how it is that I am inside of a such a big body, when in fact I am so small.
I think about calling my mother for a good hour before I finally manage to do so. By then it is pretty late, but she is awake. I ask her to just talk, so I can hear her voice. When I was a child, she used to read for me so that I could fall asleep. Now, she recounts some of the stories she read. She tells me about the Moomins. Her voice is the same. I am still crying, but some of the tension releases. The breathing calms. The pain doesn’t really ease, but I feel grateful and soft while waiting for the sleep to come. The spiralling stops. It’s as if I have more space, by fitting my kicking and crying and screaming parts into the endless space she has for me in her heart.
As if I am getting help with putting the little child that I am to sleep.
Eventually we finish the call. Eventually, sleep does come.
On Sunday morning I wake up, everything is surreal and just like always. I have already packed most of my things and I get up and slowly pack the rest. Later that day, I sit down in a train and I watch the landscapes pass by, I read a book and chat with my neighbour and I sleep and I don’t get off until we have reached Berlin Hauptbanhof the next morning.
…
Hulkuv loom 