Peace in Pieces

I am wondering how it is I can feel both immensely heavy and entirely empty at the same time.  Every movement is leaden - I feel as though I am striving against some sort of invisible force, an insignificant little bug fighting its way through a sea of resin even as it hardens into amber.

Only I find the results less lovely than amber, which I always want to lick or suck on as if it were some sort of candy.  

At the same time, I am poking around inside myself and find...nothing.  Well, perhaps not nothing.  There are the children, a suffusion of love drenching every part of my psyche.  My mother.  My friends.  If not nothing, then certainly there's a great deal more emptiness than fullness, and there is a veil both ephemeral and impenetrable between me and what/who I love.

If I could be still and quiet for a bit, a statue of myself stowed in some dark corner, disregarded, I feel I could perhaps reach within and twist things around a bit, remove or bore through the veil and energize my limbs so that I am human again, not shambling stone.

There is no peace.  I am, for all intents and purpose, a single mother with two children who don't know or understand the value of a few minutes of peace or silence, who both feel the need, are driven, in fact, to speak every thought that goes through their heads whether the listened wants to hear them, and both insist not only on pouring out their nattering thoughts in a ceaseless tumble of words, they require interaction and response to even the most inane things.

They do not respect meditation, reading, conversation with others, or even sleep.

This adds to the heaviness, to the emptiness, because I feel I should want to hear them, want to interact, should feel delighted and honored to have two articulate, creative, imaginative children.

There's a thumping refrain in my head...like the bass thudding relentlessly from some trendy club, spilling out into the streets and causing nervous twitching in passersby.  Peace.  Peace, peace, peace...

In bits and pieces, moments, minutes, I just want a little peace, and then a bigger peace, and then a surfeit.

Perhaps then I will find what I need to set aside this dense nothingness, this heavy lightness of being.