Tired

There are so many ways to be tired.

There is, of course, the ten miles into a run and can’t manage another step kind. And the I’ve been up with a baby all night exhaustion. There is the starving and haven’t had a bite since morning weariness and the moving into a new house and can’t lift another box sleepiness.

And then there are the more pernicious kinds, the variety that stir in the deepest places and send tendrils into every inch and crevasse of the body.

There is the emptiness of missing weeks and weeks of my children’s lives. The hollowness of being absent at yet another bedtime, of hearing details of but not bearing witness to the living room dance party, of not being the last person to give a kiss before the blessed peace of sleep arrives.

There is the desperate, neverending missing of those who are essential to my very soul existing in worlds so very far from mine. The empty knowing that this is the way of the modern world and the nagging sense that, somehow, it is all so wrong. The knowledge that love can travel limitless distances, but the reality that the daily absence of you is just so very, very full.

The daily trickle of the news that threatens to drown me and the sense that I am simply a bystander to the madness. The pervasive thought that I should have more power, that I should have more leverage, but that, somehow, the ability to harness it is just out of reach. The desperate notion that my children will grow up in an entirely different country, and the despair at knowing it may be a much, much more difficult place to live.

The wake, make toast, take the kids out, naptime, commute to work, commute home, sleep, and repeat nature of existence that threatens much more than boredom. The sense that these days, these endless and finite days, are being tossed away as though they are limitless. The wishing away of them and simultaneous desperate urge to hold on to every fleeting moment. The knowledge that I am not living them, but traipsing through them. That I am, somehow, a bystander to my own existence.

When a place that used to be home is unalterably changed and I find myself amongst strangers who used to be friends. The sense that my identity has shifted and with it, reality itself. The faith that roots I plant in shallow soil will somehow take hold and, over time, flourish and flower and thrive. The inescapable and seismic shift that is inevitable with change. The constant and repeated incantation that courage and persistence and faith have nearly always paid off and that there is always, always beauty in the things that feel most arduous and frightening. The prayer-on-repeat to be calm, be brave, it’ll be okay.

There is the ache for tiny, quiet moments with you. A house so very full of noise and chaos that when I do get a word in, it is about the litany of details we must coordinate and never about the infinite ways I have come to see and to love you. The numerous times throughout the day that I forget to say thank you or acknowledge the way a reassuring touch or gesture or kindness has sustained me. The sense that without you, the world would take on a dullness, a grey that would topple and destroy and shatter my very marrow.

I have felt so inexorably tired. And there are so many ways to be that have everything to do with the heart.