Father is dying. The words sit plain as stones but I can't hold them. They slip through my fingers like water, like the energy that used to live in my body, that animate thing that made me move through rooms, through days, through the motions of being a person who exists.
I've been sick myself—body turning traitor, adding insult to this injury of living. Everything aches. Even my hair feels heavy. I am so tired of being tired, of this bone-deep weariness that makes breathing feel like work, like lifting stones, like pushing through mud that comes up to my throat.
The trees outside are doing their death dance, flaunting their golden surrender, and I can't even feel jealous of their grace. I used to love this—the cool air, the smell of earth turning inward, the permission autumn gives to draw close, to hibernate. Now it all happens outside this shroud I wear. The season is a party I'm watching through a window, music muffled, colors dimmed.
I lack energy to even exist. What a simple, terrible truth. Not energy to do things—to work or create or love—but energy to be. To inhabit this skin. To register the world pressing against me. I am a ghost in my own life, going through haunted motions, pale and thin as moonlight.
Father dying. Me, half-dead already from this depression that pulls like an undertow, this slump I can't claw out of no matter how I know, intellectually, clinically, that autumn is beautiful, that I should feel something. But knowing and feeling have divorced, and I'm left here—numb and exhausted, watching the season I love most arrive without me, watching my father leave, watching myself disappear behind this veil that won't lift, won't tear, won't even have the decency to be dramatic. Just gray. Just heavy. Just there.