Ten to eleven again

It's a Tuesday night in early summer, ten to eleven. You're in bed with the light off, and there's a dull ache behind your right eye. It's been there since mid-afternoon.

The phone is in the kitchen, where it's been charging overnight since March. You lie still for a minute and notice the old pull. It says you could just go and look. You notice too that your jaw is tight, that you spent nine hours at a screen today, and that you've had about a pint of water since breakfast. You get up, drink a glass of water at the sink without touching the phone, and go back to bed. The ache is still there when you fall asleep.

It's there in the morning too, fainter. Over breakfast you take your one look. The NHS page says most headaches go away on their own and aren't a sign of something more serious. It says to see a GP if a headache isn't getting better or you regularly get headaches, and it lists the things that need urgent help. You read the list once. None of them applies.

You write in the calendar, "Headache since Tues 3rd. See GP if still there Friday, or if it keeps coming back." You close the page. It took about four minutes. By Wednesday evening the ache has gone, and on Friday the calendar reminder comes up and you delete it.

The calf stopped twitching in March, a few days before the date you'd written down. You never found out what caused it, and you've stopped wondering.

It hasn't all been smooth. In April a mole on your shoulder sent you to a forum for forty minutes before you caught yourself. The next morning you looked at the NHS page. One of the items on its list for seeing a GP seemed to fit, so you booked it. The doctor looked at it under a lens, said it was fine, and told you what changes to watch for. You wrote them down. The thought that she might have missed something came the next night, as you'd expected it would. You read what you'd written, saw that nothing on it had happened, and watched television.

The card on the fridge has four marks on it for last month. In February it had thirty-one.

You still notice every flutter and twinge, and you probably always will. Now when you notice one, you know what to do about it, and then you get on with the evening.

If you've read this far and changed nothing yet, do one thing tonight. Put the charger in the kitchen before you go to bed.