#oh eww this made me cry when i re-read it for mistakes

[rainbowvamp]

There’s a difference between familiar and used to.

The feeling of being so tired after doing nothing like an ache in his bones is familiar. He’s felt it before. He knows what it is. He knows what it means. He knows that he’s going to have to work harder to get out of bed today. That objectively knowing the world is always getting better isn’t going to make him feel better. He knows that there will be lead in his feet all day. And weights on his smile. And a void in his heart. He knows that. It’s familiar.

Familiar doesn’t mean used to.

He thinks if he were used to this, he’d be able to power through it better. He thinks if he just had more self-control. More will power. More desire. He’d be able to talk himself out of his own downward spiral like he might be able to talk himself out of a 1000 meter free fall.

Except you can’t talk your way out of a 1000 meter free fall. Not any more than you can talk yourself out of the familiar ache of Everything is Too Much. He knows the only way out is through. To hit the ground, get patched up at A&E, and spend a while healing. He knows he needs to rest. He knows he needs to eat. He knows he needs to go out into the sun.

He also knows that he has papers to grade. And parents who want to yell at him because the best he can manage isn’t good enough. He knows that the school year isn’t over for another three months and testing season is just around the corner and so things are about to get worse.

He knows that.

He knows that, and it cancels out all the other things he knows.

And he stays in bed on a Sunday. Heavy like lead. Strapped down like his blankets are steel bars. He can’t move. It’s too much. Everything is Too Much.

He takes a deep breath and reminds himself that that’s okay.

You can’t embrace life without embracing all of life.

Sometimes life is depression. Sometimes life is overwhelm. Sometimes life is memories of drowning slotted between the feeling you get when there’s more work to do than you can manage and you think you should manage it anyway.

Sometimes that’s what life is. You have to take the good with the bad.

He twitches aside the curtain by his bed. Lets a sliver of sunlight fall across the back of his hand. It’s enough for now. Later he might able to muster more. It’s enough for now.

He lets the sunlight warm the smallest part of his hand and reminds himself that every fall must end. And every testing season must pass. And every parent who has no idea what his job is like eventually moves on to harass some other poor sod and then the thing starts all over again.

And every time it starts over it gets a little better. And he holds onto that hope, strapped into his bed by blankets that feel too heavy to move, and he lets himself sleep another hour, because it’s Sunday and he deserves to rest, even if he doesn’t feel like it. Sometimes rest is what your body needs, even if your brain disagrees.

And if he dreams of a pale hand holding his, sometime in the next century, then that’s no one’s business but his own.