Last Friday, something foggy and ill-defined tackled me around the knees and took me down like a sack of flour. I hit the ground with a thud, lay there a bit stunned. If I had truly been a burlap bag filled with milled wheat, you'd have seen a puff of white ripple through the air, then settle over my prone form like dust.
Simply put, I was exhausted. I whipped out my calendar, made a list of upcoming engagements and plans, then canceled them one by one. "Sorry," I explained, "but I am being the canceling jerk, canceling our plans last minute like only a jerk would do." A jerk, or a really fucking tired person.
I've been overextended for months, bailing each day like a sinking boat: pailfuls of work and heartbreak and new dates and family things and a kitten and household upheaval and so on. And, I kept afloat, until last Friday when at last I began to sink. My condition called for a hundred melodramatic metaphors, every cliché within in reach. And, it was a bit confusing, because nothing new happened to tip me from "maintaining" to "too much". I have a cold, I haven't slept enough lately, I have said "yes" too often and "no" too seldom, filling my schedule with nonstop commitments from day to day to day. But still, why burn out now?
This morning, I realised two things:
1. this weekend would have been six years since a certain someone came into my life
2. this weekend is roughly one year since that same someone began to sneakily disengage, while leading me to believe he was sticking around for good
I suspect this weekend's burnout is linked to being sincerely exhausted, but I also suspect a little wedge of my heart was pumping out latent heartbreak, the last bits of crap and hurt, like squeezing the toothpaste, like wringing a sodden cloth, like shaking the last drop from a bottle, like ticking off the last cliché on the list.
And now, it's finally done.
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