The Headache: A Short Story

They say write what you know—but no one ever said it had to hurt this much.

The Headache is, quite literally, the most painful story I’ve ever written. And I don’t mean emotionally painful (though there’s some of that too). I mean actual, physical pain—the pounding-in-the-skull, vision-blurring kind that turns your brain into a war zone. Like my main character, Thomas Gordon, I was working grueling morning shifts at McDonald’s and chasing the dream at night, trying to squeeze fiction out of a fried mind running on caffeine and stubbornness. The only difference? Thomas had a wife who bought his pills. I had to get my own.

This story tested me. Not just because of the migraines, but because it pushed me out of my comfort zone. It made me dig into topics I knew little about—epidemics, medicine, human isolation—and gave me no choice but to listen harder to my characters. I wanted their voices to be real, raw, tired like I was… but alive.

The Headache also holds a special place in my writer’s journey. It was the first story I wrote at a “real” desk—a Craigslist beast the size of a small country. I don’t know where that desk is now, and honestly, I was going through so much at the time that my memory filed most of those moments under Do Not Disturb. Before that, I wrote anywhere I could: Amalia was written on a bed in a crowded house. Negative Reaction was born in a car you could start with a screwdriver. Obsessed came alive on a girlfriend’s couch.

But that’s the thing about writing: it doesn’t wait for the perfect setting. It just needs you to show up—even if your head feels like it’s splitting in half.

So if you’re a writer, or someone chasing a dream while life throws bricks at your skull—this story’s for you.

Just… maybe grab some ibuprofen before you start reading. You might need it.