Migraines

Signals from the unknown.

Graham had lived with migraines long enough to respect them. He tracked triggers, swallowed preventatives, dimmed rooms like a monk tending a shrine. Pain, for him, had rules. A beginning. A peak. A merciful end.

That stopped being true three days after the camping trip.

At first, it felt familiar—the faint pressure behind his right eye, the warning pulse. He canceled plans, drank water, lay still. The usual rites. The pain listened, politely, then did something new.

It spread sideways.

Not sharper. Wider. As if his skull had grown additional interior space and something was stretching its limbs.

By day four, light no longer hurt. Sound no longer hurt. Instead, distance hurt. Objects across the room felt too far away, like they were receding from him at different speeds. When he closed one eye, the world tilted. When he closed both, something bright and patient waited behind his eyelids.

He stopped sleeping.

When he did drift off, he dreamed of the campsite—not as he remembered it, but rearranged. Trees standing a fraction too tall. Shadows bending inward. The fire pit glowing without flame, a dull violet heat humming beneath the stones.

He hadn’t mentioned the hum to anyone else. He assumed it was just the migraine memory exaggerating things.

By day six, the pain developed rhythm.

Not throbbing—counting.

Every few seconds, pressure bloomed, retreated, bloomed again, like something testing the walls of his skull. He tried describing it to his neurologist and failed halfway through the sentence, suddenly unsure what words like inside and outside meant anymore.

“You’re experiencing an escalation,” she said gently. “We’ll adjust your treatment.”

He nodded. The room behind her shimmered, briefly revealing angles that didn’t connect.

That night, the headache spoke.

Not in language. In alignment.

His thoughts slid into place the way magnets snap together. He understood, without understanding how, that the pain was not an attack. It was calibration.

Camping had done it. The spot where they’d pitched their tents—off trail, just a little too quiet. The way the stars had seemed denser there, clumped, as if the sky had bruised.

He remembered waking in the night, head pounding, staring up at a constellation that kept rearranging itself when he tried to count it.

By day eight, Graham realized something horrifying and mundane:

The migraine was getting better.

The pain receded, but something else took its place—presence. A fullness behind his eyes, as though a second set of perceptions had been installed without removing the originals. He could see the gaps between moments now. The pauses reality took to remember what it was supposed to be doing.

People flickered.

Buildings lagged.

The moon looked… busy.

He returned to the campsite alone.

The forest greeted him like an unfinished sentence.

The clearing was smaller than he remembered. Or maybe he was larger. The ground still bore the faint indentation where the fire pit had been. When he knelt, the migraine bloomed—not pain this time, but recognition.

The pressure in his skull aligned with the pressure in the earth.

There you are, something thought—not to him, but through him.

He understood then. His migraines had always been cracks. Micro-failures in the way his brain filtered the universe. He hadn’t been sick.

He’d been thin.

Camping hadn’t caused the change. It had simply placed him somewhere that noticed.

The sky dimmed—not darkened, just deprioritized. Shapes unfolded above the tree line, vast and unhurried, geometry that made his vision ache with joy. They were not ships. They were not creatures.

They were observers, and he was finally tuned correctly.

The migraine vanished completely.

Graham laughed, startled by the absence of pain. In its place was clarity so total it bordered on violence. He could feel the old world slipping, like a headache he’d grown used to ignoring.

When his friends came looking days later, they found the campsite undisturbed. No signs of struggle. No body.

Just a journal Graham had brought, its final page filled with shaky handwriting:

It doesn’t hurt anymore.
It was never supposed to.