I always knew when a seizure was coming.

The metallic taste arrived first, sudden and unnatural, as if someone had pressed a strip of foil against my tongue.

After that came the brightness.

Colors sharpened until they looked edged in glass, and the world took on that impossible, familiar feeling that I had lived the moment before and failed it somehow.

My neurologist called it an aura and explained that for many patients it was the brain’s warning flare, the last clear signal before consciousness fractured.

Most people, she told me, learned to get somewhere safe when the aura began.

I learned to look for my mother and calculate how angry she was going to be.

My first seizure happened when I was thirteen, in the middle of English class.

One second I was underlining a sentence in To Kill a Mockingbird, and the next I woke up on the floor with my teacher crying and the school nurse holding my hand.

My mother came to the emergency room in a rush of perfume and tears.

She kissed my forehead, called me her baby, and told every nurse in sight that she had known for weeks something was wrong.

When the tests came back and the doctors started using the word epilepsy, she transformed into the kind of parent people admired.

She took notes.

She asked smart questions.

She thanked specialists by name.

Relatives called her brave.

For a little while, I thought the diagnosis had done something good.

It made adults take me seriously.

It gave a name to the blackouts, the muscle pain, the exhaustion, the split lip from the bathroom sink, the bruised knees from falling in the hallway at school.

Dr.

Elena Martinez became my neurologist a few months later.

She was patient, careful, and impossible to intimidate.

She explained my medication, mapped out the side effects, and told me that consistent treatment was everything.

She said missing doses could make seizures more frequent and more dangerous.

My mother nodded so earnestly in those appointments that I never imagined she could hear the warning and turn it into a weapon.

At home, the performance changed slowly enough that I did not notice at first.

The concern remained when other people were watching, but when it was just the two of us, irritation crept in.

If I needed to rest after a seizure, she acted as though I had chosen the timing to inconvenience her.

If I forgot a chore because of the brain fog that followed an episode, she accused me of milking my diagnosis.

She had a way of speaking that made cruelty sound practical.

She would stand in the doorway with folded arms and tell me that the world was not going to stop because I felt weird, that women survived worse things every day, that if she had given in to every headache or bad mood she had ever experienced, nothing would have gotten done.

She controlled every part of my treatment.

She kept my prescriptions in a locked kitchen drawer and said it was for safety.

Every morning before school and every night before bed, she shook capsules into a paper cup and watched me swallow them.

If I asked to keep the bottle in my room so I could learn to