About a month ago I had a migraine. That happens. Later I was lying on the couch or in bed and Jim was sitting next to me or laying next to me or just next to me. I was holding my head and thinking of something from my childhood. Childhood being anytime before the age of 25. Back then I had headaches too and sometimes they were bad ones. Sometimes they were worse than that. I remember I used to hold my hand up to my left temple, as that is where the pain always seemed to congregate, and for some reason the placement of my hand, the palm to my fingers pressed across my forehead seemed to make the pain a bit more tolerable.

Likely, this was a figment of my imagination or some placebo affect I created in my head in order to make myself feel like it was feeling better for my sanity if nothing else. I remember this fine detail about my childhood because I made up a little story to go along with my little headache distraction trick. Whenever I placed my hand to my head and held it very still, another layer of bricks were laid there. The pounding in my head was our dear Mario with his mallet just doing the thing that all good Italian plumbers do, hammer away and make big messes (and sometimes crush boss fights).

Our fateful hero Mario would be hammering away at the inside of my skull in his classic red shirt and hat with blue overalls. Every smash through a layer of Brick made the pain worse and every layer of brick that I could lay with my hand holding my head made it better. I can’t tell you how many times before I discovered the miracle of modern medicine that I laid there for endless minutes watching this scene play over and over in my head. The bricks were mostly red bricks but sometimes they assumed the shape and color of blocks in Super-Breakout which we also had on our Atari 2600.

In those instances, Mario transformed into a small white bar inside of my head returning a tiny pixilized white ball to where the rainbow of bricks were stacked end to end vertically from the top of my forehead down the inside of the left side of my face. Always the left side which is really curios. If I trusted the internet I would google if there is significance to that, but you just can’t trust any search engine these days. Criminals with they proliferation of keywords has taken over. The anonymity of anyone posting almost anything has created a chaos in which there is no longer trust that any verified truth is actually true. It’s a damn shame.

Anyway, so I told Jim this story about Mario and my head and how I kept on doing it long into the years when I took meds for my migraine. How I lay there with my hand on my head waiting for the mix of Excedrin and promethazine to knock me unconscious enough that the pain was rendered powerless. Jim said “wow, that’s a great story, thank you for sharing that with me. Probably shortly after that I fell asleep because that’s the only real experience that cures the pain.

A few weeks after that, I woke up one day and decided my left brain needed a name and it’s no surprise I thought of Mario right away. That persistent little scoundrel had earned it! Of course being of a whole sound mind and body this meant my right brain needed a name too. Again, I’m transparent and predictable and enjoy puzzle pieces that fit perfectly as much as anyone so it had to be Luigi. Yup, that lovable sidekick whose green and blue are the perfect comic relief, the perfect partner in crime, the most appropriate taller Italian to compliment my left-brain Hero.

Now whenever I think about my left brain thinking in a certain way— logically or methodically or organizationally or in a sleuthy sort of way inside I say “That crazy Mario is at it again”. And then if I’m trying to apply my right brain, in an artistic or observational or sensual sort of way, of course I say “That’s Luigi hard at work writing all the poetry again”.

So today when I thought about the date, November 2nd in the year 2019 (11022019) and thought about it in a significant way, I realized that it was exactly three months until my wedding day (02022020). Earlier this week it was exactly 100 days. What’s next? Tomorrow will be exactly 13 weeks away, which seems sort of unlucky. That’s Mario though.. always working the numbers.

I wonder what Luigi thinks about how much time we have left before that very numerical day?

Game On!

~Miss SugarCookie