Hard

This is a stream of consciousness (or mind purge as I like to think of it) piece, unedited.

There's tired and then there's tired. Today is one of those days where tired requires italicises, bold font, underlines, asterixes the works. Before getting sick in 2006 I thought I knew what tired was, but now I realise just how clueless I was. It's one of those days where every molecule of vitality has been wrung from my body. Where nothing remains. Where breathing is arduous and if I catch myself thinking about it I lose the rhythm  How that's possible I don't know. Yet every time I think about my breath I lose it. It comes up short, or the rhythm is completely lost until it resembles some discombobulated Morse code that even my body cannot understand. And words, what are words, They flow through my mind a fleeting moment of clarity and then....nothing. I know I had a thought. It was coherent but now 3 seconds later it is gone. Lost to the ether as if it had never existed in the first place. Not even an echo remains  Speech is beyond me. To coordinate standing, breathing, being, with words, with responses and meaning becomes a......I don't know. An analogy is beyond me. Ask me tomorrow or the next day and I'll give you a cracker but now I am stuck with four letter words. HARD. Thinking is hard. Breathing is hard. Being is hard. There is no word in the English language that is sufficient to express the fatigue illness brings. I'm sure the Germans have a good one, or maybe the French, but I can't even be bothered Googling to find out. The tired of chronic illness is not like any other. One night out and pay for a day, a week, a month. Pay with exhaustion that renders the soul. The Ferryman has his due and I lay here on the bed typing with fingers that seem intent on their own path across the keys. I will them towards the keys of my choice. I beg and plead. But there is a disconnect. The fingers are not my own. Nor are my arms, my legs, my heart, my lungs. I am a being of discordant parts. And the tiredness is impenetrable  the tiredness conquers. I am wrong  Every part is wrong. But fatigue mutes my response. To move, to readjust or reposition is more than I am capable. So I lie incapable of movement, of speech, of thought, or anything. Everything is too much. My taxed body can take no more sound, or sight or touch. No more. A fractured person held together only by a heavy blanketing fatigue that will not lift for days. Bound and enduring. The weight of my body increases exponentially and time seems to stretch incalculable as my mind collapses under the weight of fatigue and I drift back into oblivion. Last thoughts longing to wake with the worst of it past. Last thoughts more feeling than words. Muted feelings. Too hard to think too hard to feel. To hard to be. Wake me tomorrow or the tomorrow after that when the worst is passed and my old normal re-establishes itself. The old normal which I bemoan and disparage but at times like this shines golden. Sometimes it's these steps back that make us appreciate what we do have. But for now I'll bury myself under doonas and blankets and pillows and form unintelligibly cries in my mind more a jumble of feelings and images than words. And just focus on being on surviving till I emerge once more. Till the pieces connect again and unity is once more established. Till I can breathe and stand. And stand and talk. And move in the tiny realm I inhabit. And live. Till the next time I dare venture into the world and am lost once more.

Michelle