No matter how quickly I rush home from work, how fast I eat, how rapidly and semi-carelessly I fulfill the immediate academic requirements of the day, I am only left with fifteen minute breaks in the day.
With my whole heart, I just want this semester to be over and done. Even though I have so many things to do before January 5th, I would gladly take the stress of doing those, rather than the drawn out, burning out, endlessly aching feeling of these classes.
Among the increasingly impossible stack of everyday things that I am running after is now taking care of the sick. I am not particularly maternal by nature but I do know how to be humbly attentive, as long as my patience holds out. Every time you drift away from me in slight delirium, and I have to leave to attend to a thousand other things, I go slightly catatonic with hurt and silence.
I have never suffered from such a profound lack of discourse as I am experiencing right now. I lack any words strong enough to penetrate the protective shell of numbness, and its subset of warm affection, down to unspeakably blank sadness around which everything else rotates.
Reading old Charlottesville City School Board papers from the desegregation process yesterday at work, I contemplated why we are weak and amnesiac. I knew people mentioned in those bulletins, and I knew that they had been involved when I was attending the very high school that was to be the result of these battle lines. But how could I have brushed that aside so lightly? Why are we constantly apathetic about the very real struggles of our parents' generation?
And why am I not as strong or as self-sacrificing as my own actual parents? I still don't understand how they unrolled their private drama and still functioned as a unit, always overshadowed by our needs, constantly at odds with their own families.
Maybe I just had less to lose, or less desire to save what I had. Or more of a self-destructive pride in just being free.
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