Teresa: Saint & Otherwise
By Kelly R Samuels
I learn the day we visit the shrine for something to do that Teresa is the patron saint of headache sufferers. She carries around an arrow, a heart, and a book.
Teresa, the girl with the short dyed blonde hair, was a college friend. She shared an apartment with Jason who I ended up dating/sleeping with for six months until I found out he was also sleeping with two other girls I – absent of any affection – nicknamed the B-52’s.
Back then, I didn’t get headaches like I do now. I got them occasionally and for short periods of time. Before that, I didn’t get them at all. Or, more accurately, I didn’t experience their accompanying pain. I just got the auras, which led to my mother taking me to the doctor and asking him if I was in danger of becoming schizophrenic. He said, no, that the auras were the early stages of migraines and that we should be thankful the pain wasn’t being felt yet. That would come later.
And it did, like I said, occasionally and lasting about a day, the first two years of college. The migraine would arrive suddenly, like a large, squawking bird on the lawn, and render me useless. And then go, just as suddenly.
This was when Teresa and I hung out, listening to the Cure and thinking we were cool. She didn’t have a car and I had a car, so I would pick her up and we’d drive to the cemetery and lounge on the grass and work on our skin cancer. We’d read aloud the novels we had to read for classes and the poems we didn’t but just loved. We’d feign accents and speak as if we were the dead, risen up for the afternoon.
Once, maybe twice, I’d start to see the shimmery lights in my peripheral and she would have to drive me back to my dorm, park the car in the lot, and walk back to the apartment she rented with Jason. She never complained. She’d offer to rub my temples, but that never worked – the pressure points being in other places we didn’t think to look for.
She was tall and never wore skirts and had hair a little shorter than Mia Farrow. I can’t remember her major, or if she graduated. She was Catholic and though she was gay and fully understood the church’s position on her sexual preference, she always wore her tiny gold cross necklace along with a cheap velvet choker and a long silver chain that resembled more a dog leash.
I think the last time I saw her was when she told me she couldn’t drive to Milwaukee with me to see Sinéad O’Connor in concert at that amphitheater that I swear was by the lake; her boss had scheduled her to work and he was being an asshole and if she called in sick or didn’t call in at all, he’d fire her and she wouldn’t be able to pay her tuition.
This was just after I learned about the B-52’s and about a year before I endured headaches so bad I would curl up into a fetal position in a dark room and whimper and a boy I did attend the concert with, and left years later, would try and make me feel better.
I can hear her saying maybe her name lent her powers, kept the pain at bay.
THE END