What I love about fatigue.
I have a form of leukemia that doesn't know when to shut up and go home. As I am always home and talk less than I ever have before, the circumstances were ripe for this genius state to make me its love shack.
Fatigue is the wonder of it.
Fatigue has made me a fervent observer of and participant in many worlds of tides and currents I didn't know I shouldn't miss.
Which I didn't know I didn't know until illness taught me how I've fled the better blessings.
For the purposes of identification: those are the ones you'll never recognize until you cannot stop yourself from being taken and known by them.
What I love about fatigue is that mine makes me an ocean.
All I've known before it is shore life.
A shore is a fingertip of where we find comfort in what's familiar...
Even when that familiar is not necessarily treating us like a friend, let alone a familiar.
And the ocean? We can recognize what it looks like.
But oceans are what never ever becomes familiar.
And what about what is familiar? It only nods at us without looking much into or at us at all.
Only what never becomes familiar works very hard to know us and to make us -- at last -- known -- to it and to else.
For what is familiar is what we can bear to imagine and remember from the fingertip-like shore of all existence.
Leaving that shore (only almost by choice -- a push is a wonderful thing and falling forward much better than any purposeful stride) is how I've found, of all things, exactly the thing lacking in my life.
Intimacy.
Of course, intimacy turns out to be very much like drowning. Not in that I'm suffused and overwhelmed or even perishing.
It's in how I am poured from full buckets into empty ones ceaselessly. The buckets are made of fatigue as is what is poured into them. And I feel not gutted, not drained, not ennervated but more alive than before.
Just with absolutely no energy.
The sense of life is not because I feel pushed to some edge of annihilation.
To pour from the presence of absence to the absence of presence is how social arrangements get made for a daily/nightly playdate with your own soul.
Don't try to figure it out. It isn't a metaphor, parable, paradigm.
It's that I left all shores and all shores have left me.
Fatigue is the wonder of it.
Fatigue has made me a fervent observer of and participant in many worlds of tides and currents I didn't know I shouldn't miss.
Which I didn't know I didn't know until illness taught me how I've fled the better blessings.
For the purposes of identification: those are the ones you'll never recognize until you cannot stop yourself from being taken and known by them.
What I love about fatigue is that mine makes me an ocean.
All I've known before it is shore life.
A shore is a fingertip of where we find comfort in what's familiar...
Even when that familiar is not necessarily treating us like a friend, let alone a familiar.
And the ocean? We can recognize what it looks like.
But oceans are what never ever becomes familiar.
And what about what is familiar? It only nods at us without looking much into or at us at all.
Only what never becomes familiar works very hard to know us and to make us -- at last -- known -- to it and to else.
For what is familiar is what we can bear to imagine and remember from the fingertip-like shore of all existence.
Leaving that shore (only almost by choice -- a push is a wonderful thing and falling forward much better than any purposeful stride) is how I've found, of all things, exactly the thing lacking in my life.
Intimacy.
Of course, intimacy turns out to be very much like drowning. Not in that I'm suffused and overwhelmed or even perishing.
It's in how I am poured from full buckets into empty ones ceaselessly. The buckets are made of fatigue as is what is poured into them. And I feel not gutted, not drained, not ennervated but more alive than before.
Just with absolutely no energy.
The sense of life is not because I feel pushed to some edge of annihilation.
To pour from the presence of absence to the absence of presence is how social arrangements get made for a daily/nightly playdate with your own soul.
Don't try to figure it out. It isn't a metaphor, parable, paradigm.
It's that I left all shores and all shores have left me.
posted by stubbins at 12:09 PM
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