Ear Tickle

I boarded the bus that takes me from my apartment to campus. It was another day, partly cloudy. There were a few people on the bus, but not too many. We went a couple of miles on Glenn and then turned south onto Park. That's when I felt it. We were passing over some kind of dirty and gravelly section of street. It was monsoon season, which comes regularly at the end of the summer in SE Arizona. The dry, cracked ground doesn't soak up the lake-like puddles left from the tumultuous thunderstorms. So the water just lies around for awhile, and some of it, the part that isn't caught in crevices or ditches, flows, carrying whatever doesn't resist it. When the bus rolled over that gravel, and those twigs and pebbles and whatever else was engulfed in that rich brown layer of muck made the colossal vehicle vibrate, I endured an infrequent sensation.

I couldn't figure out whether I liked or hated it. My only thought was that I wanted to experience it more so I could come to some sort of resolution of the matter. I had to know. Was I enjoying this or not? The innermost corridors of my ears tickled, sort of a light, almost an imperceptible itch. It wasn't uncomfortable or annoying, like when a gnat buzzes into it. It was a dull sensation. The question somebody asks you when you have a headache, "Is it a throbbing pain or constant?" I really couldn't answer here. The feeling was so minimal that there wasn't enough variation for it to be a throb, but it did change, reflecting the texture of the road. We continued along the sinuous asphalt until we reached a clear area. I was in mental never-never land the tingle anymore, but I was thinking that I felt it. I sensed, every alternate microsecond, an infusion of the same stimulus which had hitherto so confounded me; just as quickly, I would dismiss it.

"No!, we're not travelling along the gravelly stretch of road anymore; I must be imagining the ear tickle now. I'm not prepared to explain it, but the simulacrum, the shadow of the tickle continued to hold the attention of my braced body. I was accustomed to it from the previous stretch of road. Could my psych-self have appropriated the `real' sensation I had felt, reproduce it as its likeness. Why didn't I feel exactly the same? Was it because of my logical mind `knew' that the condition of the road was causing the feeling, and that we weren't on that stretch anymore? Was I feeling the same sensation, whose intensity had diminished due to a reason that I could not perceive?

All I remember is that I continued to feel something, for at least two minutes after I believed I should have stopped feeling it. Like when you wear a baseball cap around all day. You finally take it off, but a few minutes later you still feel like you have it on.Your hair's matted down and you couldswear that you feel the cap's headband, snugly fit around your head. You're forced to put a hand up there and feel around to reassure yourself. "Oh, yes there isn't a cap up there." As soon as you pull your hand away, the indecision wins out. "When I put my hand up there a minute ago, did I really feel that there was no cap there? Maybe it was there and I just didn't feel it for some reason, because now it feels like that damn cap is on my head again."