Fatigue is a warm pulse in your bones. Fighting not to fall asleep on the metro and miss your stop. But you’re so tired your limbs are shaking with it. And the effort of staying conscious has your focus narrowed into tunnel vision: the name of your station as the automated voice repeats it for the second or third time; the rush of air as the train vanishes through the tunnel at the end of the platform, the miserable crush of bodies packed onto the escalator; the antiseptic stink of the bathrooms as you shuffle past a decrepit cleaning lady and fumble the lock of the stall door like it’s the only thing keeping the rest of the world out.
And no one that took a pen to these filthy cubicle walls ever had to go through what you are now. Pressing your pounding head to a graffiti wall as you shake and shake and try to cry, to feel anything.
Your eyes are just wet enough for your makeup to have smeared across both cheeks and your jaw aches with cramp when you force yourself to stop clenching your teeth like that.
When your chest stops heaving with voiceless sobs you wrap a line of toilet paper around your fist and tell yourself to pull it together. You’re okay now. It’s time to go home. Then you think of that shit-hole you try to call an apartment and the black desperation explodes in your chest again knocking the breath from you. You press your face to your knees and wrap your arms over your head. Rock yourself against dry sobs.
You think, this is not how life should be.
No one should ever feel this bad. and: I don’t know how to fix this.
You think, I am fucking up my life.
