Member-only story
Dear Everyone: I’m Still Tired
Can we have a holiday from all the horror?
We play a game. You sit on the other side of a screen and in that baritone voice I’ve grown to hate, you ask me about my wants. If there’s one thing you could have, what would it be? And I cycle through all the regrets — the friendships excised and the cruel words exchanged, a mother’s bones in a cold grave somewhere out in Long Island, all the moments when I could’ve made a better choice. I used to say yes to things. I had moxie, I had energy — I was a woman on the move and the make! You tap your eraser nob gently on the screen as if I’ve been asleep this whole time, dodged your line of questioning, and I ask you this: who uses pencils anymore?
I think about the mornings I stand on the curb at the end of my block and I want to walk the five miles, I do, but the idea of it — the car horns and barking dogs, the strollers weaving and the runners dodging — has become too much to bear. I spent a year hiking through mountains and desert and now I can’t make it a mile without longing to turn back. Because the walk, all of it, I realize, is a terrible idea. The worst idea possible, and seriously, who uses a pencil? Who tap-taps? Are you the kind of man that wears a bowtie?
Please advise.
