The second aura in a month unfolded like a mylar flower in the center of my vision last night. I had to abandon work on a visual scratch-pad I've been working on, a nonspace sort of like this forum but with vastly fewer words. In a half-hour, the distortion was huge, and rather than observing the world through its shimmering glassine tentacles, I was navigating the house with eyes closed. Susan came home from a meeting and started making dinner while I sat at the counter, playing the blind man who is renowned as an excellent conversationalist. I tried to remember if migraines were the result of cerebral vasoconstriction followed by compensatory vasodilation, or the reverse. Only in very rare cases in my life has an aura been followed by an actual headache, but they can be unnerving all the same. One waits for the elephants to appear over the distant mountains, marching in tight phalanx, treading on soft neurons that split and spray their soft contents like crushed papaya under the calloused feet. And then perhaps the soft concussion of brain hemorrhage, a collapse of muscular control, the paralyzing loss of words. The last session in my EMT reciprocity class had been on stroke, and I was primed for neurological disaster.

A little while later, I was amazed to find that Susan had assembled an entire meal right in front of my unseeing face. I was so tightly focused on my dark internal states that I had been totally unaware of other events taking place in the room. By then, the auras had slid towards the edges of my visual field, where they hung tenaciously for another twenty minutes or so. I began to experience the slightly sluggish, post-ictal sensation that generally sweeps in following an auroral display. Actually, it's more like post-orgasmic, except without any of those positive feelings. There is a certain emptiness. The body does not fit cleanly into my brain's representation of physical space. It is an old topography, late 50's, before the advent of satellite mapping. Even when the aura departs, my vision feels bruised and wet.