The Last Minute

I hate that phrase and phrases like it. As if our emotions bear weight on us, tear at us physically. I have always struggled with that notion, finding it especially amidst writing that waxes poetic. I muscle with it, trying to discern how we could ever emote in units of measurement I am light and happy, our hearts are heavy, I feel a thousand pounds lighter, I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders... until I remember depression, how my body just didn't move, couldn't move. How everything screamed with a dull ache, from behind my eyes to the soles of my feet and light, porous precious light, made the marrow in my bones turn to lead. I've been feeling an unexpected heaviness, a pain crouched in the caverns of that place I might call a soul crying to be undone, let free, unchained. It isn't depression because as much as I want to stay in bed, there is a flicker of something still there. The flint and steel still spark, I still walk, heavily as it may be, to the ba

I can feel my body shutting down. Exhaustion is closing in, and I am struggling to stay awake. In two hours I will wake up itchy with worry.  It will settle comfortably for the night in the pockets of veins not yet occupied by things I have to remember to do. The truth is, I am stressed. It's been two days since school started again. I have never felt more out of place in a learning environment. Uncertainty appears suddenly in my vision, vitreous detachment, then it is usurped by the list . You know the one you make that never gets finished; by the time you've crossed something off another thing has been burned into flesh in its place. These are the things you really really promised to do. But not tonight, because there are other lists that come first.  I've had some terrible people experiences lately. They aren't by nature evil people, certainly human at their core, but I've let them in. Like the rhino whose attitude was soured by the sand sneakily left in his