By Ari Smith

Pain warps time, stretching it thin. Hours expand, becoming infinite, until the entire world is reduced to a single, suffocating moment.


When I was a child, I was terrified of snakes, and I still am. The thought of their coiled bodies, the way they move — silent, sudden — fills me with a dread I can’t shake. Once, I forced myself to touch one, a non-venomous breed. Its skin was wet, its muscles tense beneath the surface and shifting under my fingertips. It wasn’t what I expected, but the fear didn’t fade. It only settled deeper.

Pain is the same way. It has never been stagnant. It shifts unpredictably, swelling and retreating in intensity, leaving me stranded with myself. I amIt’s just me, alone, sitting straight-backed, bone-stiff, or lying on my stomach, my face buried in a flat pillow.

But pain takes shape. It is not just a sensation but a presence, blurred yet tangible. Something that can be named: a snake.

I feel it first in my chest, the barest flicker beneath the skin, a ripple where no ripple should be. It glides up my neck, curling under the slope of my chin before slipping into the base of my skull. If I’m still enough — , if I hold my breath and listen closely, I can almost hear it move in, a slow, deliberate slither, like the hush of silk over bone.

It moves its way up my chest to settle in the base of my skull, penetrating my soft brain as it glides back and forth before coiling tight. At first, I try to fight it with logic. I drink more water. I quit drinking soda. I trace the path of remedies like scripture, chasing superfoods and supplements, searching for a cure I can believe in. But the snake does not care for remedies. It coils deeper, pressing into the tender spaces behind my eyes, tightening its grip whenever I think I’m free.

When I was younger, road trips were a constant — mostly to visit family. But no matter the destination, every car ride seemed to stretch into the endless, grueling eight-hour drive to Poplarville, Mississippi. The motion, the monotony, the hum of the tires on the highway — it all blurred together until, at some point, I had to clamp my mouth shut as an overwhelming, metallic taste flooded in, like pennies dissolving on my tongue. IIt felt as though every drop of moisture and every ounce of blood in my body was rushing to concentrate in my mouth, as if my own biology were betraying me. I sat there, stiff and silent, fighting against the urge to retch up the half-digested McDonald’s and the sour residue of Trolli gummy worms that had, until that moment, settled uneasily in my stomach.

Doctors spoke of scans, of tests, of answers buried in the language of machinery. I grew to resent them for it, how easy it is for them to suggest such things, as if pain needs proof, as if suffering must be seen to be real. What would they find? They would find nothing but a void where a cause should be. My pediatrician would have to conclude that I was living in a body with no name for its tormentor.

I fantasized that my face would melt off, and that my eyes would remain in their sockets long enough for me to see the culprit of my turmoil. I imagined the snake being exorcised from me, ripped from my skull, flung from my body. I could swear this exorcism would kill it. The snake seemed to have lived off my insides alone. Instead, it’s coiled and smug, as if it’s about to strike me.

Pain warps time, stretching it thin. Hours expand, becoming infinite, until the entire world is reduced to a single, suffocating moment.

I have measured my childhood in fragmented moments, each one a marker, a signpost along the unending road of endurance.

I’m on the school bus, slumped against the window, music in my ears, lost in some far-off daydream. The rhythm of the road rocks me into detachment, and for a moment, I forget I’m even in motion. Everything feels still, w. Weightless. But then, just as suddenly, I’m yanked out of it. The realization slams into me:, I am trapped inside a moving vehicle. My stomach turns, and panic creeps in. I want to get off. I want to escape. I want to fling myself out the emergency exit, to be anywhere but here, or maybe something darker., I want the entire bus to vanish in some freak accident, swallowed up by the road.

In that moment, the bus becomes a microcosm of my larger experience with pain. Trapped in motion, suspended between two states of detachment and panic, there’s an overwhelming sense of helplessness. Just as the pain often feels like a slow, inevitable journey, this ride encapsulates that same feeling of being caught between spaces, a body moving, but not moving forward, always edging toward the discomfort of what's to come.

Nobody enjoys crying, but I have always avoided it like the plague. It expels the day's worth of hydration I worked so fervently to maintain, draining fluid from my most delicate places.

The memories blur together. There was no single ‘worst’ migraine, no definitive ‘worst’ day. At some point most days, I’d end up in the nurse's office at school most days. My parents always approached the school’s calls with a gentle benevolence that I cherish. But one day stands out:, the day when, for the first and only time, the pain reduced me to tears.

I remember barely double digits me roaming the house like a dead girl, testing every soft surface, thrashing like the provoked snake itself, until I settled on our little red woolen reading couch, curled up and sobbing. I couldn't believe what was happening to me.

There is something uniquely cruel about a body that betrays itself. It embeds itself into the fabric of your being. It becomes indistinguishable from you. I grew cautious. I learned to fear touch, to fear movement. Any wrong shift, any moment of carelessness could awaken it.

Then one day, something shifted. I woke up, and the snake was quiet. The pain didn’t randomly disappear one day, though it felt like it. It faded gradually and imperceptibly, until one day the realization hit, that it had not been a constant.

The pain did not vanish. It never could. But it no longer ruled me. The migraines became occasional rather than inevitable. NThe nausea no longer dictated my days. The cycle had broken, not completely, but enough. Enough to feel free. Enough to imagine a life beyond survival.

WAnd with that freedom came curiosity.

I turned to my laptop, not with dread, not with fear of the light triggering an attack, but with purpose. Some SSRIs, I discovered, had been shown to ease migraines. They worked by redirecting serotonin and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters tied to both mood and pain regulation. And suddenly, it made sense. The connection between mind and body. The way pain seeped between the two, never content to be confined.

I sat with that knowledge for a long time. I let it settle. The idea that the pain had never been just physical.

Nowadays, the snake sleeps, content. It coils in the hollows of my skull, shifting only slightly, as though lulled into slumber. Some days, it writhes. I exist as it lashes against the walls of my mind, gnashing invisible fangs, twisting itself into impossible knots.

But I no longer fear it. Like the snake I once touched, it is simply there, alive but powerless, non-venomous and harmless in its stillness. It lingers, but I am no longer paralyzed by its grip, knowing that it no longer holds the same bite. ■