text: Something is crawling around in my brain. At first, it was just a tingle that began at the base of my head. Then it began moving up, farther up into my brain. The tingle that first drew my attention to it was light and felt like a centipede crawling across my skin. Its small legs drag as it moves, each step reminding me of when you step into an ant bed and they begin crawling and biting your toes, and then your legs. But instead of it being my feet and legs, it is my brain that feels each poke and drag. My brain, that I cannot scratch to stop the crawly feeling, my brain that is the destination of every nerve in my body and alerts me to any pain or injury there on it. "When did this feeling first begin?" the doctor asks as they type on their tablet, never looking at me as I speak. "A month or two ago...I think. At least, that is when I first started to notice the feeling." I had thought the feeling would go away, that it was just stress or depression causing the soft touches of whatever is in my brain. I maybe could have lived with the feeling if it hadn't started to get worse. The soft tingle began to grow and get deeper within the folds of my brain. First, soft movement like that of an ant, then it became more noticeable resembling the touch of someone's nails as they slowly ran across the top of your hand. It happened the first time while I was sleeping, lost in a dream I looked ahead into the dream setting and I saw a shape standing in the dark, and as I watched it the figure began to move, crossing over and through me before moving off into the darkness behind me. Instinctively I reached up to touch my head, scratching at what I thought was the spot that was tingling. But the scratch didn't satisfy the itching and the feeling began to grow, and grow, evolving out into a wider area. "Ok, and has there been any changes to your lifestyle, or diet, or fitness?" asked the doctor, his eyes never leaving the screen in front of him. His fingers tapping lightly upon the keyboard. Click...click...click. I shut my eyes as I tried to not let the sound distract me from the question. Had there been any changes? I mean, there had been changes to my stress due to this issue. I couldn't focus on school, so that was a change but that wasn't entirely my fault. I would set myself up for success by removing distractions around me, when I studied I wore earbuds and listened to relaxing study music that is supposed to help with brain concentration. The problem with having something in your brain, tingling you, is that it never goes away and when you wear earbuds it doesn't quiet the sound in your brain, it makes it louder by removing the distractions of the world. "No...no changes since last time." I watched as the doctor nodded, continuing his keyboard song as he typed. I wasn't sure what all he could be typing, he hadn't inspected me, or asked me anything that would require a full keyboard orchestration. The doctor stopped for a second, looking up at me, the first time since he had sat down in the examination room. "You had mentioned last time I saw you that you were suffering from the feeling of brain fog and..." his sentence hung in the air, unfinished as he looked back at the tablet, using his finger to scroll up. "That you are having trouble concentrating and are having issues with short-term memory loss. Is that still an issue?" I nodded, twisting my hands together in nervousness, occasionally pushing my fingernails into my skin. The silence that hung between us was thick and awkward as he waited for me to provide more of an answer. When he got bored of waiting, he returned to the music he was orchestrating on his tablet, tapping once again upon the keyboard, each clicking like nails on a chalkboard to me. "Well, I think we are facing the same issue of formication and your body is reacting to it by your nerves overreacting, which is sending signals to your brain. You need to increase your exercise regimen; I would recommend yoga or some form of meditation. You also need to make sure that you are taking it easy on yourself and avoid situations that may cause you unnecessary stress. I am going to increase your medicine by 50mgs. Continue taking it once a day at night along with the things I just recommended. Come back and see us if symptoms continue to get worse." And without a further word or look, he and his tablet were gone, out the door of the room. Off to go visit the next patient in the room next door, off to find something more interesting than just my weird brain tingle. I continued waiting on the table for a few more moments I waited there so long that a nurse came in to reset the room and looked at me perplexingly before I got down and walked out of the room. Once out of the examination room, I made my way to the exit, picking up my new prescription before pushing the heavy brown door open. Then down a flight or two of stairs and out into the thick humid summer air. The heat was so oppressive, and it clung to my skin in a thick blanket of condensation, wetting my clothes slightly from the weight. The faster I could get to my car the better, into the air conditioning, and away from the large office building behind me. The building was full of doctors and nurses and receptionists who stared at me, judging me and were critical of the issue I was facing. None of them believed me, I knew that. They all believed it was stress, or lack of sleep, or lack of exercise, or whatever. I had described the issue so many times to each of them that I no longer was sure if it was all in my head, figuratively not literally, as I truly believed. All the way home the crawling in my head continued, starting more towards the top middle, and making its way up towards the front, near my forehead. My hand moved unconsciously up to my head, pulling, and twisting at my hair before scratching at the area that I could feel the tingle coming from, the same pattern that happened multiple times a day in search of just a little bit of quiet. Any relief that my routine provided was short-lived, and by the time I reached home a couple of pulled hairs lay on the car floor, and there was now a small scratch on my head from my search for relief. Inside my apartment I removed my shoes, setting my bag on the hook by the door before heading to the couch that lay on the far wall. I sat, feeling the couch cushions molding around me as if the couch was hugging me from behind, offering the comfort that I had been denied at the doctor's office. In the time it had taken to go from the car to the spot I was currently sitting at, I had pulled more hair out of my head, and my scratching intensity had increased. The tickle in my brain had worsened in the short drive home and had expanded to the right side of my brain. The soft caress of nails now felt like someone was running a fork over each quarter of my brain. I leaned my head back, closing my eyes, willing the pain to stop, to go away forever. Some people believed in the power of positive thought, that you could good things happen just by being positive. Well, I was positive this wasn't working, nothing was. I had made changes and followed the advice of my doctor, and I still could feel the tingling in my brain. No scratch was powerful enough to beat the tingling, no medicine was potent enough to provide relief, and no one believed me when I said it wasn't all "in my head". This wasn't going away, and it was getting worse. A day turned into a week, a week into a month, and months became years, and still, the tingling continued in my brain. I had stopped paying for doctor's visits, I had stopped mentioning to friends and family about what was happening. There were only so many eye rolls, scoffs, and pointless advice I could take. I had adjusted my diet, I had increased how much I exercised, and I meditated every day. My little tingle, as I now referred to it as just continued relentlessly. Increasing in strength and coverage as time had progressed. As I stopped talking about it, everyone around me happily obliged by not bringing it up. I was left alone in my suffering, left alone to stumble through continuous brain fog. So many times, I had "awoken" to just sitting at my desk, staring off into space, unaware how much time had passed. I had given up on school, I had dropped out months ago, though no one knew it. I had begun failing every class I took, unable to remember simple things, and thus failing every test and quiz I was given. I was at my wit's end; the pain was nearly unbearable, and I couldn't even concentrate long enough to watch a movie. Most nights I fell asleep drunk or high, both barely providing relief as I slept. The few times I had tried to sleep without them I had tossed and turned all night, resulting in more brain fog and pain. On the third straight night of restless sleep, I finally decided what I would do to fix the issue. If no one was going to believe or help me with this, I was going to fix it myself. I slid my legs off the bed, my feet slipping into my slippers on the floor. The slippers provided silence from my walk as I moved into the kitchen and over to the junk drawer. My fingers pushed past lighters, candles, pens, post-it notes, and other junk until I felt cold metal. I removed the screwdriver from the drawer, clenching the handle as I slammed the drawer with my other hand, my slippered feet turning back towards my room. Down the hallway, through my door, which I softly shut behind me, and into the tiled bathroom. The lights over the sink gave the room a dull yellowish glow, with shadows being cast all around, including under my eyes. I leaned my forehead towards the mirror, my hand searching and moving over my scalp as I tried to find the spot where I thought the tingling was currently. The crawling intensified as my fingers pushed at a spot just above the top of my forehead. As I pushed on the spot my ears filled with the sound of moving legs and feet, the sound was so intense that I looked around the room, sure that the sound had to be around me rather than inside me. As my eyes turned back towards the mirror the reflection made direct eye contact with me, and within those eyes, I saw exhaustion and pain and the need to keep going, to find the thing that was crawling inside my brain. My fingers shifted farther back on my head; the crawling having moved from the spot that I had found before. This time though, when I felt the small bump on my head, the source of the tingling, I didn't hesitate. I raised the hand that held the screwdriver and drove it into my head and the source of the tingling. I felt the blade of the screwdriver as it broke through my scalp and pierced the soft, squishy, Jell-o like substance that was my brain. For a second, I felt relief, the tingling gone and silence filling my ears for the first time in months. Then, the crawling started again, moving from the spot where the screwdriver had struck to farther back in my head. As it moved, I felt the pricks of its' feet, tickling my brain as it traveled, stopping when I once again drove the screwdriver into my head. This pattern continued a few more times before I finally found relief, my body slumping to the floor in exhaustion. My hair, shirt, and hands were covered in red, sticky blood. The floor was covered in pools of the same blood, and these pools were increasing in size as I laid against the tub, the screwdriver resting next to my hand as my body heaved with each breath. And for the first time in years, there was no tingling, not one single step from whatever had been living in my brain. I closed my eyes and listened to the silence, finally relaxing, finally having relief from the torment I had felt for so long. The diener pushed the just cleaned corpse into the room, lifting the cart and sliding the body bag onto the waiting table. The coroner watched as the diener removed his cart and left the room, the swinging doors ticking back and forth before returning to their stationary position. The coroner had read the file on the body while it was being prepared, suicide, a female, age 24, who had suffered from depression and anxiety. The officers who had found the body and had filed the paperwork had put down penetrating brain injury from a Phillips head screwdriver that was found next to the body, covered in pieces of brain tissue, hair, and blood. His heart was heavy as he unzipped the bag, revealing the young woman within. At first glance, everything seemed normal, his hands moving over her face and head as he examined the wounds there. "It looks like there are 10 entry points in the skull, resulting in perforation and damage to the brain tissue." He turned the head to the side, looking closer at one of the entry points. "It appears that the screwdriver went about 5 inches into the skull each time, meaning that..." he stopped as something began to move within the brain. He pushed aside more of the hair and fragments of bone as he looked closer at the wound. First, the movement inside was small, twitching slightly, before its movement increased. After a few moments of movement within the brain a small head popped out from the mush of the brain tissue. On the head were two long, red antennas that twitched and flicked about in the open air. The head was followed by first one thin leg, then another, and between them a section of a body segment. The coroner stared in shock as he watched the arthropod crawl out of the brain and into the hair. He reached out with his hand, his other hand holding a small collection container, his fingers nudged at the back of the centipede, urging it to move into it. As his gloved fingers touched the centipede, its slow movement changed into frenzied and desperate movements. It turned towards the hand, and slipped up onto the fingers, up the coroner's arm, up his neck, and straight into his ear before the man could stop it. And as he swung and swatted to try and stop the creature, but all of that was in vain, it had already reached his ear and had made its way inside. As the centipede burrowed its way into his head and his brain, the tingling began.