Le Souffle Cortical

Lyrics

It begins as a falsehood. 
A tear in the fabric of sight. 
Not a blind spot, but a spot of too-much-light. 
A scintillating scotoma. 
The heat haze on a winter road.

Then you begin your walk.
You are not a storm. You are a change in the air pressure.
A slow, inexorable tide across the folded shores of my cortex.
Two millimeters a minute.
You measure your progress against the beat of my heart.
A patient cartographer, redrawing the world in silent ink.
You don't rush. You have all the time in my world.

And they call you Cortical Spreading Depression.
But I hear Le Souffle Cortical.
The cortical breath.
A wave of depolarization, a cellular sigh.
Followed by a beautiful, terrible quiet.
The streetlights of the mind going out, one by one.

Aristides Leão saw you first.
On a lab bench at Harvard. Nineteen forty-four.
He watched you move through a rabbit's brain.
He heard your arrival as the sudden flattening of a line, the scratching pen of the EEG going still.
He gave you a clinical name.
But I feel you as an uninvited guest who knows where all the keys are hidden.

They call you Cortical Spreading Depression.
But I feel Le Souffle Cortical.
The cortical breath.
A wave of depolarization, a cellular sigh.
Followed by a beautiful, terrible quiet.
The streetlights of the mind going out, one by one.

It's the fortification spectrum.
A castle wall of shimmering, zigzagging brick that builds itself in front of my vision.
And behind that wall, the kingdom is silenced.
Words lose their meaning, becoming just sounds.
Faces become patterns.
The map is still here, clutched in my hand, but the territory it describes has vanished into the static.

And then, just as slowly, you retreat.
The tide pulls back.
Leaving... what?
An ozone scent behind the eyes.
The memory of a perfect silence.
The lights flicker back on.
Not all at once.
Street by street.
One thought at a time.