The extreme tiredness of me

Think back...sitting here, I tell myself to think back. Back to the moment that I was this tired before...

Reach back through the cobwebby and muddled memories that clutter my brain and find the precise time that my body ached this much, that my emotional stability was this frail and that my need for quiet was greater than it is right now.

I remember the first time I did inventory when I started working retail back in St Louis...18 hours on my feet. Tired. Dead tired. I remember coming home at 3 in the afternoon, stripping my clothes off as I walked to the bed and tying a black tee-shirt around my head to block out the light. My legs were numb. My feet were numb. My head so incapable of the ability to construct sentences that I managed only to let random words slip from my lips, with no real relevance or meaning.

And then I slept.

Now that I think about it, the only other times I have been this physically and mentally drained has been due to work.

Telling. Truly. Fuck.

I almost have to laugh, because when it comes down to it...I just care too much. I have never been able to walk away from something that hasn't been completed. I have always forced control over my surroundings and placed a hold on my own needs to finish the task at hand.

I think that is why I have been avoiding people, places and things of comfort. Or why I seem to crave it more. Hyde and Jekyll...who am I today.

My job has taken control back. I felt it go. I didn't like it much. No, not much at all. I know that it is temporary but, dammit, that isn't how I operate. There is a methodology to all I do. Trying to be spontaneous is just that for me...trying. I am scientific, observant...studying the correct way to control the situation and then pushing my way to the lead and doing it. I don't do drugs..why? Because I hand my control over. I try to moderate a lot of things. I desperately try to place markers, guidelines and fences all around, so I can accurately determine if I have been successful.

Pathetic, huh?

But the exhaustion? This is it...the apex. I stand teetering atop the other instances of weakness of body and mind. Conqueror of what? My body? My intellect? My need to do more, be more...take more on?

Maybe this feeling is because I am really under it all...slowly being buried by adding more and more weight to the pile. Suffocating, swallowed by the mountain of memories of soaking my feet and standing in hot showers and washing away the ache of too many hours of existing vertically.

Who knows. Who really knows, really. I am probably stringing thoughts and feelings and fatigue together into an unknown element to the natural world. A chimera.

My brain hurts. My feet hurt. My legs are logs, big creaking timbers that feel the heaviness of their load with the precision of a perfectly calibrated doctor's scale. Bitterly and blindly honest.

Time to pack and sleep.
More to come later...
Tomorrow is St. Louis.
Then Sunday I am back.