By Nadia Djamila
I paint my scalp with mayonnaise and minced garlic and horse dewormer. The doctor calls it many things:
Grief.
Major depression with psychotic features.
Delusional parasitosis.
He doesn’t feel the staccato of little lice feet tap-dancing across my skull by the thousands. “Nothing to worry about,” he says, tousling my hair.
But that’s what the medics told my mother fourteen months before we buried her with neat nylon stitches where the bone saw split her skull. Her tumor was the size of a walnut, the color of currant jelly.
It’s all in your head, they told her.
Until they were right.
Chef’s kiss.
This is very cleverly done!
Fantastic–very evocative, and powerful!
So much feeling in so few words. I am sure this will strike a chord with all of us who have experienced loss. Phrases well thought out and expressed from start to finish.
Your words carry such rawness that reading your story had a particular emotional effect on me.
Beautifully done.
Thank you for sharing for take on grief and loss.
Brilliant!
Impossible not to read on after that first sentence.
Very powerful and poetic, speaking to different dimensions of illness in so short a space—health anxiety, the failure of society’s mainstream healers, the dismissal of the experiences of the ill who are outside of categories, the identification with an ill other that can drive you crazy—and the pun is not in service of humor but is rather hooked to a visceral punch! Congratulations, this is a really good one.
The first sentence grabs the attention of the reader. Reminds me of the action of my 9 year old self when i cracked an egg on my head because i read it was good for hair. The odor wafted from my hair for days.
The last sentence reminds me of my mothers death from brain cancer, glioblastoma multiform.
That’s perfect.