Ache

Aching is part of life. I tell my little one to hang in there when she doesn't feel like going to school or to her dad's. We all feel that way sometimes, I tell her. But the truth is I feel that way now and I don't want to hang in there. I want to go to sleep for a year. Shut the door, go from snoring to hazy waking back to snoring until everything gets rebooted.

It's sort of a headache. It starts every single day when I hear my alarm. A prickly feeling behind my temples that creeps down to my stomach and makes me want to check online news because it feels like I'm in shock, processing some vague unpleasantness, that maybe I've sensed a disturbance in my slumber and that if I scour the news I'll discover the source of the panic I feel. By now I should know that even a skyscraper collapsing in a metropolis couldn't produce this sort of dread. It's a special kind of darkness I feel when I wake, mysterious and dank. Like my own insides are rotting, and I'm waking to the realization of slowly rotting from the inside again, and again.

Life and death happening simultaneously. Like a tulip emerging in spring, with leaves that are stunted from the last freeze, but pushing up regardless of their deformity. Each new year from the bulb emerges a smaller and sadder plume of color, until it becomes sterile, monochrome. It stands briefly, then wilts back to its nucleus where it resumes its sleep, gathering what nutrients it can in the dark as it hides comatose, awaiting another miraculous, though increasingly less impressive, resurrection.