Bad Days of the Heart

I can't predict them. I can't explain them. Bad days of the heart.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. It started soft and warm with the threat of rain, but soon cleared up for one of the brightest most delightfully fragrant warm early summer days this year, or perhaps ever. But the clouds which passed from the sky remained in my heart.

By all accounts it should have been just in my head. Friends who get the migraines as I do, told me it had for them been a day for a real pounder, but my head was mercifully clear all day. Of course I should be thankful for this, but typically, selfishly I was unconscious; hurting elsewhere. It was my heart which hung heavy and dark, impervious to the gentle sunshine bathing my skin. I am not sure about this state of being. How does this work? How can I be happy and anguished at the same time? Is there no end to this contradiction; is this unpredictable haunting eternal?

In many ways, the metaphor of the migraine seems apt to describe these bad days. It is not an irony that light should weigh me down so; quite fitting that my dark heart should be aching so bathed in light, for my eyes want to burst when pulled inward by the pain of a headache. Unlike the pain of a migraine, the pain of grief is invisible to the world. So I press on. I am keenly aware that my head and heart do not define this world, but only serve to make it that much more precious to me.