Confused?

Anyone want to hear another migraine story?

So, just at the edges of a bottomless pit of a headache, a migraine can cause this weird blurry vision. Sometimes it feels like when you’re dreaming and try to read something: Suddenly you realize that whereas you can tell those are words printed on a page, words possibly from a human alphabet, you cannot necessarily glean any information from them.

I was waiting for my train, and found the cold cement floor more inviting in my condition than one of the benches formed of twisted iron prongs. Earlier, in times before the Migraine, these benches had been formed of smooth steel, painted an inoffensive, soft hue. Now they resembled something out of a gothic torture chamber.

Anyway, there I was sitting like a drunk on the ground when a short, fat man walked in front of me, standing on the undulating walkway. He had a ripped-open brown bag, looking something like a disposable lunch-sack, and from the remains he produced a stack of leaflets. Around Christmas, churches and other organizations tend to spread flyers advertising differing holiday events. Presuming this man an arm of some association for feeding the poor, or a representative of some church promoting their orchestra, I managed to steer my wavering arm in his direction and take an offered pamphlet.

. . . and was unable to read it. The words floated around me in a sickening dance. However, I was aware with hot embarrassment that this was not a flyer for me. There was a nude woman on it. Stylized with fog obscuring any detail, the well-proportioned silhouette looked like she was stepping out of the vapor of a shower, a simple step away from revealing all.

The fat man was withdrawing, and I called him back. Expressing in well uncertain terms, some even verbal, that I did not want this piece of paper he had handed me—understand, with my migraine the prospect of walking over to the wastebasket and throwing the lewd scrap away seemed an herculean feat—he stared at me perplexed. He inquired whether I wanted the paper. In couched, embarrassed language I told him no.

Realization flashed across his face, and he assured me this would be held in a theatre. More confused than comforted by this information, I tried again to read the leaflet, holding it out at varying lengths while trying to blink the black spots out of my vision. All this was, however, to no avail, and any attempt to decipher the page was out of my scope for the time. The only information I could parse from the flyer was the naked woman, and the thought of carrying around some advertisement for a peepshow, or even of holding such a thing, embarrassed me nearly to the point of muteness. I may have even babbled like an inebriated fool.

I pressed him to take his flyer from me and he capitulated, shaking his head as if saying, “Your loss.”

In more sober reflection, free from the asphyxiating migraine, I have tried to comprehend the whole of the matter. Was it indeed a peepshow he was promoting, or had my assumptions based off of the photo been misled by the erotic image? Whatever the case may be, it seemed an odd enough story to note.