I’m tired. Not just tired, but desperately exhausted. Don’t tell me to take a nap. It isn’t that easy. Sleep is a fickle friend of mine; won’t always do business with me. It’s a commodity I continually chase with spotty success, and there’s no end in sight to the insomnia.
I’m tired for more than just sleep, though more sleep would help tremendously. I don’t just need a good night’s rest, though. I need days of sleep; days and days swimming in the murky depths with no dreams to show their wide-eyed faces, begging me to follow. I can’t; not now. I want to, I really do, but I can’t.
I’ve been saying that a lot lately: ‘I can’t’. I can’t because I’m tired and I have to prioritize, but here is new and they don’t know me, so some of them are offended, I think. There are voices out my window—laughing voices and running footsteps and I want to add my own because I want to make it here; make a life here that is more than resting alone in my dorm. I know that, and I know it usually makes me sad, but tonight I’m too tired to care.
I’m so tired, my eyes are literally sinking deeper into my face. There are hollows by them that haven’t been there before; dips and crevasses I’ve only seen bordering the eyes of women much older than myself.
I’ve been losing lots of things lately, and forgetting things too. For awhile now I’ve felt older than my age, but lately even more so. It would be easier, I think, if I looked as old as I felt. Maybe thirty. Some days, more like sixty or eighty. Then people wouldn’t expect these things of me—these things when I just can’t do them. I’m sorry, I say, but I can’t, and they say alright but it isn’t really because their faces go all closed and flat when they turn to walk away.
I don’t want to explain myself anymore. I’m tired of these complications. A few relationships have even been ruined because I discovered non-understanding sides of people that never would have had anything to do with me if I wasn’t sick. But then those sides became colossal walls between us, proportionate to the amount of my life that is affected by my disease. Which is all of it.