Exhaustion

Sometimes, you get tired of fighting.

You get tired of seeing your efforts play out into ineffectuality.

The tide of the world—
your politics, your community, your family—
wash over you and drown you:
A tidal wave of responsibility,
of giving a shit,
of fake smiles for everyone who asks.

You get tired of yourself, even.

You see your reflection
and you just can’t—
don’t want to—

Even so,
all you see are the flaws people point out.

Your wild hair.
Your soft curves that have only grown softer in direct proportion to your fatigue.
Your stubborn refusal to paint yourself a new face like “proper women.”
Your banality.

What do you do then?

What do you do when you're so tired
you feel 50 years older than you are?

Who do you talk to
when everyone around you feels just as tired as you are
and is just as helpless?

Doctors offer to medicate the problems away.
But it’s a goddamn farce,
a pair of blinders
so you can walk around ignorant
and blissful.

It would be enviable if it wasn’t so empty.

Another hollow gesture
in a hollow world.

Sometimes, though, you feel less hollow:

When you see your lover’s smile,
when you stand in a window,
when you lose yourself in fiction,
or in your imagination—

All those fleeting bubbles that protect you,
that let you catch your breath,

before the world cuts off your air once more.

You just want to let go,
to surrender to the void that yawns below you,
that terrible, tantalizing maw...

But something in you balks at that,
makes you cling all the harder to what few strings keep you tethered.

Sometimes you’re tired,

and sometimes you remember how to float.