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Hi, it’s me. Back again with a re-write of one of my early & brutal Age of Aquarius stories. If you read this one the first time around and loved the ending, it’s still there. But a lot has changed too, enough to make a second read worthwhile.

If you hated the ending, you are still going to hate it. I’m sorry (no, I’m not).

CW: self-harm, illness, one seriously gory moment

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An impossible problem comes up on a slide: To stay in orbit around a black hole without falling in, a photon would have to be traveling at what velocity, in kilometers per second, where R equals your distance in meters from the center of the black hole?

These words make no sense to me, even though they should. I close one eye and then the other, squinting in the bright light of the projector. The words shift diagonally while I struggle with them, sliding away from me, vibrating on the white background. Please no, I think. Please not a migraine.

My neck is tense and my shoulders ride high. I try to relax, roll them out, force a yawn to release some pressure in my ears.

Time’s up. The professor shouts out “Seventeen kilometers per second!” It sounds like another language. I try to scribble it down in my notes but she is merciless, replacing the slide with another bright white square. I wince.

Theoretically, photons traveling at this ‘Goldilocks velocity’ could stay in orbit around a black hole for millions of years.

A laugh like a bark erupts from me before I realize this is not a joke. I’m supposed to know this. The word Goldilocks means…something. The baby migraine sends its sickening tendrils through my brain, demanding my attention.

Another slide flashes onscreen and the space behind my left eye throbs. Migraine knocking.

“This,” the professor explains, “is the first-ever image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.”

In the picture is a red doughnut, streaked with yellow and orange, black in the center. The void in the middle is made up of square black pixels, indicating as best as a computer graphic can the place where light goes to die.

The nothingness at its center pulls an urge out of me: the promise of annihilation, of everything becoming a black nothing. The desire to touch something that’s certain to destroy you.

I’m shocked out of my trance when the overhead lights blink on. Looking down, I realize I have drawn a sloppy circle over and over across my notes. I squint against the sizzle behind my eyes.

When I get up, the black hole hovers in front of me, a shimmering overlay on my world. It’s tiny, a little disturbance in my vision, a whisper of a place where the air doesn’t sit right. This is an aura, the migraine’s intimate, private calling card. The way the taste of root beer can remind you of your first kiss, an aura will prickle my skin, wafting memories and warnings into my mind. I feel a flutter of familiarity, of fear tipped with excitement. I roll my neck, draw one slow breath as the lecture hall empties out.

Then it’s on. I’ve never had a migraine in public, and surely they would institutionalize me if they saw the wretch I’m about to become. I cram the notebook and pen into my backpack and rush out. By the time I’m on my doorstep, the pain has developed into a deep throb. Every time it hits, I feel the floor drop out from under me, nausea twisting in my guts. My breath is ragged, my hands shake. I struggle to get my keys in the lock— the sound of metal on metal is a drill into my skull.

I open the door and see the black hole floating in my apartment. Its black mass slowly swirls, sharp yellow and red streaks slicing around the edges like neon. This is a full blown hallucination. Nothing’s impossible in migraine land, but this is new. The door slams behind me, thunder cracking inside my head. I press my hands to my temples.

I let myself fall face forward onto my worn-out futon. The fabric is rough on my cheek and it smells like weed. I pull a pillow over my head to block out the light.

The migraine takes me into myself, into a trapped world of red and black where almost nothing else can reach. Reality collapses into a fist-size lump of incandescent pain and I turn it over and over in my mind, searching for a cold spot to rest on. My thoughts feel thick and my back teeth slide against each other. My fingertips start going numb like they’re falling asleep, like my body can’t handle any additional sensation.

In my freezer, still in its pristine plastic package, lies a frozen ice headband I’m supposed to wear right now. I have never once retrieved it in time to stop a headache and once again, I will not. Going to the kitchen is no longer possible.

If I can move, I should try to get to the bathroom. If I get there I could open a drawer—which will make a sound like a car crash—and sort around in the dark for my pills.

To unwrap the pills, you have to split the cardboard from the foil of the little blister packs. Get the tiny pill out without fumbling it. Thinking about those packs makes me boil. Whoever designed them has never met a migraine.

I know. They put them in the blister packs so it’s harder to take too many. But there’s no such thing as too many. I would take them all.

Oh.

I am pathetic, searching around for flimsy solutions, frantic escape plans that crumble to dust as soon as they’re found. My brain is liquefied.

I get my knees underneath me and press my left eyeball, an overinflated balloon, into the thin couch cushion. Behind and inside it, my whole heart beats in one spot. My chest is vacuum sealed and I pull in tiny breaths against my own will.

I hear someone moaning, a miserable ghost wailing nearby. I hear another sound too, a deep whooshing, the sound of a faraway geyser.

I realize with some shame that the moaning is me. The geyser—

I crack my right eye and the black hole is there, lazily spinning, growing just a tiny bit bigger with every rotation. My backpack is open on the floor and papers drift out like a slow fan is blowing them.

I think you’re supposed to have a friend to take care of you in this situation, to wipe a cool hand across your forehead, pinch the back of your neck into relaxing. The migraine message boards talk of support systems and care plans. Like everyone lives in a group home with clean white sheets and sober people around to open pill packs. Like everyone has a personal assistant on call to check that the black hole in their apartment is not real.

I press the heel of my hand into my left eye, and use my right to check the black hole for some evidence that it’s all in my head. My papers start streaming into it, lifting off the floor like lazy butterflies. I sit up on my heels as the shock momentarily overrides the pain. Papers can’t move into an aura.

The black hole tugs at my sleeves. When my hand leaves my eye I feel a second of relief. The hole tugs there, in a soft but insistent way that feels like a muscle ache. I rise to my feet like someone’s helping me up. There is a loose stretching in my limbs, my neck, gravity meeting me in new ways.

From the tiny mouth of the black hole comes something beautiful: a perfect empty void, an all-knowing nothingness. It promises the calm of eons spent in cold darkness. The calm of the light killer.

In a gust of energy, the curtains on my window reach for the black hole and sunlight floods in. My headache screams back to life like a fire hose. I double over and press my eye again, this time with my fingers. I push down hard as the pain engulfs my head and neck.

My left eye sees stars. The pressure is too much to survive. I have a vivid thought that I could reach behind my eye and squeeze the nerve, choke it to death. In my mind it’s a red tube, ferrying electric pain between brain and eye. I imagine squeezing out its blood like toothpaste, and all the pain going with it, landing on the floor in a wet blob. Would I trade an eye for relief? Not happily, but I would. What is this eye anyway, but a locus for suffering?

The black hole yawns in front of me. I glance up from the floor and take in the sweet calm of obliteration. I want in.

I lay my head in my hand, cupping my skull. My face is hot and damp. I take a breath and dig fingers into my eye socket until I reach liquid. The ghost roars. I curl my fingers around like a claw and feel the inside of me, slipping and steaming. I grasp something hot and horrible and pull.

I don’t look. But when I open my fist, my left eye, red, ragged and shining, floats across the empty air toward the black hole. For a second, it joins the light streaking around the rim, and I watch with my remaining eye as it is warped, elongated then shredded, the orbiting photons slicing through it like shards of metal. What remains of my eye is confetti, and it disappears into the void, particle by particle, sucked down a whirlpool.

I get to my feet a newly hollow person, with a hole in my face and my insides scraped out. My head pounds but this is a soft, dry headache like smiling people have on medicine commercials. Sunlight finds its way in through the curtains and marches into the void, the black hole urging those photons to their deaths, and I don’t even flinch as the light lands softly on my brain. I feel woozy but my thoughts are clear.

I cover my bloody socket with paper towels and face the swirling dark. Gratitude overwhelms me. Tears are dragged from my cheeks and I watch them twinkle in orbit. Goldilocks. I get it.