Hangover Headache
It hit with the sudden inevitability of a hangover headache, as if to remind me that the good times were temporary and could only lead to pain. She was leaving me. She was leaving me no matter my protestations, no matter how good a case I made for her to stay. She was leaving and I was irrelevant. I had nothing to say in the matter. I was just the receptacle for the pain.
It wasn’t that she was anything special. It wasn’t that I was more in love with her than I had been with anyone else. I was not particularly happy with her, it’s just that I wasn’t particularly unhappy. It’s a slight difference. Being unhappy and not being unhappy. It is, perhaps, a difference only in degree.
But the difference is stark and the difference is everything. Being not unhappy often means being with someone, or at the very least, having someone with whom to share that not unhappiness. The severing of that bond cuts the cord, leaving you in a formless blackness that gives you no reason to grope blindly because there is nothing out there to grasp.
But nothingness is not the same as emptiness. Nothingness is lack of something positive, not the absence of anything at all. And thus we return to the hangover headache.
Hangover Headaches
Hangover headaches start as the point of an arrow driving all before it out. Coming when we’re unconscious, put in a coma by our happiness, in many instances. Our consciousness of it isn’t gradual as the point presses home. It comes to you in an explosion of pain. A welcoming or perhaps an initiation. But there is no cleansing as that point expands to fill the entire space of head, subsuming all thoughts and obviating the possibility of any other action.
In fact movement alone becomes difficult, light is unbearable and noise is excruciating. It is not much a matter of staring into the abyss but the overwhelming desire to leap, to wallow in the null, to let it envelope and consume you.
I can remember one that stands out clearly. We had a party in college and I had a new bottle of Jack Daniels. A friend brought a bottle of crown and another friend, well he was there too. The three of us retired to chambers with one of the guy’s girlfriends who graciously agreed to poor the shots for us. We attacked the crown first.
The clock read 7:30 when I woke up. The small black and what television in my room was on and Brother Bob Tilton was preaching.
“Are you lost friend? Are you suffering? What is the nature of your sins?”
Brother Bob was getting louder.
“Are you up all night, chasing alcohol and drinking loose women?”
I’m not sure I heard that last one right.
“Are you suffering and trying to kill the pain.”
I remembered finishing off the Crown the night before, then reaching for the Jack Daniels and breaking the seal. As that memory flooded back my focus shifted to the foreground to an object on my nightstand. I was the bottle of Jack, with about an inch of whiskey left in it. The three of us had polished off two fifths.
“HAVE you given in to the EVILS of alcohol?”
Yes, Brother Bob, yes I have. Help me, Brother Bob, what can I do to get your help.”
And Brother Bob answered.
“Send me $1,000 right now, and I will pray that the Lord heals your pain. Send me …”
Brother Bob was, at that point my only hope. Which, of course, is to say there is no hope. There was only a massive headache. And my father knocking at the door to take me to work on our other rent houses.
And that is where all connection with humanity ends. Hammering nails, mowing lawns and sawing boards under the direction of a man who had his first drink on his 21st birthday and has never been seriously drunk in his life, not out of religious belief, but out of pragmatism. Why would anyone deliberately do something that impeded proper function?
Hangover Migraine
It is an interesting fact about the hangover migraine, according to John Hopkins Medicine, that people susceptible to migraines tend to have more intense hangovers. Those who suffer for no known reason, other than losing the genetic lottery in this instance, tend to suffer more from their actions as well. Those whom nature isolates tend to become more isolated when they deviate from nature’s plan a Catch-22 demonstrating the intrinsic role suffering plays in human nature.
So we are left alone in a Hobbsian world of suffering. Each man’s pain is his own, the result of a unique cocktail that cannot be shared and cannot be replicated. Each hangover headache has a unique genesis, whether that genesis lies in raucous celebration or solitary anesthsation. Each hangover headache reminds us that we cannot transfer our burden to another person and thus ease it. There is not mother’s succor, wives embrace or friend’s empathy that can ease the pain we feel deep within.