So tired, as if every cell in the body had reached the limit of exhaustion. Sleepless, without appetite, apathetic, tearful like a child without a peer on the school playground. The internal and external bruises are all on your skin in a tumult of pain that you don’t really know where they are going.
The midlife crisis, that much-feared breakdown. Not knowing who you are, being clueless inside and outside your dreams, lost in yourself, in others, without wanting anything. A single wish. Sleep. Sleeping for days, weeks, months, indefinitely. And the body, this contrarian, this annoying person, doesn’t even allow that.
Having friends and not having the energy to hug them, not having the strength to clean the house, go shopping, carry out the small gestures that used to fit into the day and that have now become extremely difficult tasks, even the simplest things, washing the dishes, taking a shower, combing your hair, everything requires an inordinate effort, life itself weighs in and notices weight gain.
The light bothers you, the noise bothers you, the existence of others disturbs you, and your own presence, now foreign to you, also bothers you.
You don’t know what to do, for the first time in your life, you don’t know. And perhaps it is precisely there where you no longer know, where everything seems to have lost its name and meaning, that your opportunity for something new begins. You don’t know exactly what, or if you’ll have the strength to do it. All you can do is stand in front of the unknown and let something happen. And may the stone of Sisyphus make the weight of being sustainable.
These chronicles are part of a fiction project by writer Cláudia Lucas Chéu with P3. A marathon of daily chronicles with no goal in sight.
