A few weeks ago, I set the goal of writing a short essay every Sunday.
It is Sunday. And thus far, I have not written a short essay.
The reason’s pretty simple: I’m tired.
I’m tired in a way that I haven’t been for some time. Though, if we’re being honest (and why not?) not so much time that I don’t remember it. This tired and I are acquainted. We’ve met before. Walked together; shaken hands. When I see him standing on the porch, knuckles poised to rap, I think,“Oh. You again? All right,” and open the door because I know he won’t stop knocking.
This is the tired you get when things start piling up, one after another, each thing not much in itself, but, balanced on the back of the thing before and the thing before that, grows into something cumulative and weighty.
It’s a weight you feel in your shoulder blades and in that space in your forehead, just above and behind your eyes. It builds, pressure upon pressure, then releases itself in a cloud of thick lethargy — that hour on the couch you didn’t mean to spend; the odd tears, driving to the grocery store, about what, you ask yourself. Nothing, really. Nothing at all.
I felt this tired coming on when I got home from work on Friday. But I pushed through it. Walked the dogs, cleaned the house, exercised. Slept. Pushed through it again on Saturday. Went to writing group, walked the dogs, cleaned the house, exercised. Slept. And slept.
And then it was today. I got up from sleeping. Made it through a cup of coffee and slept again. Dozed until it was time to walk with a friend, managed that, came home, ate, slept.
I woke up to a dog anxiously pawing my shoulder. Wake up, wake up.
“Wake up,” I thought. “Wake up.”
I took him outside. Came back in, and slept.
And now it is tonight. I have done the laundry and cleaned the house a little. I wrestled the closet off the kitchen into some kind of order. It looks better for now, but it was probably a fools’ errand.
That closet is one of those collecting closets. You know the kind.
It’s the place for the Allen wrench you don’t know what to do with and the pack of birthday candles you don’t know why you have. It will absorb the brown paper bag of extra screws and washers and the bag of dog treats the dogs don’t like. There’s an attachment for a vacuum in there. Maybe the vacuum you have now; maybe the one that broke last August. Who can tell?
Arranging that closet is like trying to arrange tired. Like writing a sentence with all the right pieces — subjects and objects and verbs — each set properly in its proper place — and then drawing back and looking at it — the sentence, that is — realizing it doesn’t make any sense.
And it doesn’t make any sense, trying to arrange tired.
Tired just comes, without asking permission. Weight gathers, pressure builds. The air outside is heavy with water that will not fall. A bird chitters away, disconsolate; talking to himself, it seems, since no one answers.
And I am talking to myself. Writing this essay as dusk creeps in after a day of tired. In a moment, I will get up. I will take the pajamas from where I folded them neatly on the made bed this morning, and I will put them on. I will brush my teeth, set the coffee to brew for tomorrow, take the dogs out one last time, and give myself over (one last time), to tired.
Tired, who I’ve met before.
Who came today, and stayed a while, and left me, in the end, this writing; this time of clear quiet after all the muddled dreams.
Not a bad gift, for all that.
Tired, who I’ve met before and learned (mostly) not to fight.
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