I am tired.

Mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

COVID. The Election.

I am exhausted.

There is a tiredness I feel deep in my bones. In my soul. In my very being. A heaviness I am having trouble shaking.

I heard it echoed back to me today as I waited in my eye doctor’s lobby.

I was back (again) because I am still having trouble seeing things up close. The big picture is clear but the details are fuzzy and out of focus (typical of my life.)

There was an older man in the exam room whose voice did more than carry.

Hard of hearing, he spoke louder than needed, but he needed to be heard so he made sure he was.

He spoke of trouble driving at night; of how reading was difficult.

“I hear you.” I thought in solidarity from my plastic chair in the lobby; arm outstretched, squinting at an angle at an outdated issue of People magazine.

“I had had a good life,” he veered off track suddenly, once he sensed he had an audience.

“The last few years have just not been much fun.”

That’s the rub isn’t it?

The end is when we should enjoy ourselves yet the end is just not that much fun.
Especially now.

Reading between the lines, filling in the blank spaces between the words, I could tell he was alone; the big picture and the details of his life suddenly swimming sharply into focus.

“Which is clearer… A or B?”

Both were clear and both broke my heart.

He was ushered out as I was called in.

Trading places like an exhale.

Having both said and heard too much, we exchange sheepish smiles; me with my tired eyes since I was wearing a mask, he with his whole tired face because (I assume) he no longer cares about himself or the world at large.

While the tired plant in the lobby smiles not.

Tries to balance all the stages that lie between the root which has given up and unearthed itself, and the unknowing and ungrounded bud who boldly, blindly, stretches towards the fading, filtered, window light.