Knowing What to Call It Doesn't Always Help

It's not always some kind of sadness, depression. Sometimes it's being tired, all kinds of tired, tired to the bone, tired in body, mind and spirit, tired to the point of stupid, tired but sleepless, tired, tired, tired.

Tired of thinking everyone else is tired of hearing it.

Tired of feeling it and talking about it and hearing one's self talking about it.

Tonight, as I write this, I am tired.

I was trying to find a name for what I'm feeling, in this moment. Not just tired, but...something...something else.

It occurred to me, just now, that what I'm feeling, in addition to everything else, on top of everything else, a little louder than anything else, is mourning. I feel as if I am in mourning. So sad, and lost, and as if I have lost something only I don't know what, cannot name it, but it's gone and I won't get it back, and maybe I never had it to begin with.

And there's a loneliness to this mourning because I feel so awfully alone.

As the hours grow later, I feel it more keenly, this isolation, this absence of presence.  It gets heavier and I find it harder to breath, and pretty soon I am squeezed so damned hard that I leak out my eyes, hide my face in my pillow so the strange, strangled, keening cries that lurch out of me in fits and starts don't wake my kids.

And in the morning, I get up and move through the day as if it matters that I do, move through the day in a sort of daze, on auto-pilot, doing the things I should be doing because someone, somewhere, says I should be doing them, and I can't feel anything but this sort of lost, lonely, mourning misery, and no one can see it because I'm that good at hiding it and they don't want to see it or know about it, do they, because it's all so stupid and boring, and what right do I have to feel this way, anyway, shouldn't I be grateful for the life I have?

I can't touch the life I have.  It's all around me and I can't feel it.

I try to remind myself that I'm really better off than so many who feel this but don't know what it is, but you know what?

Knowing this monster that's trying to devour me whole, knowing what it is and what it does?

Doesn't mean a damned thing when it has me in its teeth.