The day started well enough. A lovely walk in the early morning, mild rain and the sweet smells that it brings; a strong but sweet latte and a snippy breeze in the last 10 minutes sitting outside before going in to work.

Even work was a bit like that—a morning task that was simple, but pleasurable, it allowed all my organizer-muscles a little swim in easy waters. And that finished, I went out for a bit of a walk at lunch.

The wind had picked up and spat rain around in a fitful manner, so it was a bit colder. Standing three blocks away from the office, looking across at the shops, I could feel the first stirrings of nausea which are often a clue that things may go badly very quickly. I walked back, went to my desk and took a dose of anti-nauseant and wished for a hidden place where I could curl up in the soft dark until this died down.

But it’s a new office, and quite beautiful as offices go, so there is no such place. The best one can do is the bathroom.

I tried a number of techniques I have, slow breathing, imagination exercises and the like, but the nausea just sat there and glowered at me. The relationship between conscious mind and the sensory homunculi that make up the ground of consciousness is difficult at times. We can only read the desires of the body through the body itself and there is always room for error when reading the state of a pale face, or the sensitivity to the smells of the world. I kept working in a quiet, clearing up kind of way, then at four, I could go. I had to fight myself all the way home. Don’t panic. Don’t throw up. Don’t start moaning, because by now the nausea, the pain’s forerunner, had taken over and all I could think about was controlling myself until I got home.

Then the first pains came, a rolling boulder grinding against my innards.

I think it’s a bit like a panic attack in the way it takes over. My brain is swamped and all that is left is the battle for self-control until a safe place is reached. I am of that age and ethnicity that the idea of losing control at work or in public is just so offensive that it never even occurred to me to call for an ambulance or even a cab.

I made it to the train station and luckily there was a seat free while I waited the few minutes for the train. A woman came by and handed me a rose, quickly followed by another. Her face. She spoke, and later I realized she had said Happy Valentine’s Day, but it was her face. It’s amazing what we can know when the mind is shut down. Her pale skin and the rapidly widening eyes when she caught a look at me. The tension on her lips, and the involuntary retreat of her head from my proximity.

There are random people here that go about on Valentine’s Day handing roses to men and women. It’s a nice practice I think, but it sets their minds on the idea of love, of companionship and the desire of people to connect that causes them to read other people from that point of view. And my misery showed I suppose. What she took it for cannot be certain, but since she left me two roses instead of the normal one, and took off, I suppose she thought my pale face and the sheen of sweat that comes from trying to hold on was the misery of someone unloved.

I smelled the orange and pink blossoms and they were very faintly of rose, and underneath a pale echo of the soil that once clung, but I could not carry them. I could not spare the attention or energy to transport them with me  so I left them on the seat next to me, behind a young, very pretty, Asian woman and got on the train to go home.

I made it back, but by the time the door opened to my apartment, my restraints had broken and I went blubbering, puke bucket in hand, to bed.

It’s now some 12 hours later and you know what’s the worst? Not the pain, or even the nausea, but that I have no idea what specifically sets these attacks off. And since I have no control over when they occur, I am forced to live my life planning for their possibility. Oh the dark caverns of the mind! What, oh what, you homunculi, did I do to offend?