Clinking the last dish into the drainer, she dries her hands and the single tear running down her cheek. “Self care” she hears her therapist say, in the echoes of her ever chattering mind.
Walking past the unvacuumed floors and today’s untended mail, she makes her way to the washroom and draws herself a bath. Bending over to place the stopper, steam drifts towards her face…and another tear falls, joining the tiny ocean she is building.
The same clothes she’s been wearing for two days now, falls to the floor. Stepping into the hot liquid, she remembers the mound of laundry waiting for her…“Not now”, she thinks.
Saturated and soaking in the steamy bath, islands of bubbles float around her body like lonely continents and collect at her breasts. The warm water soothes her aching muscles, releasing the pain from her soft tissue and pushing it into the bony prominences of her spine that lies flat against the hard bottom of the bathtub. Plump, pink feet propped on the stone wall in front of her, she judges their pudgy appearance, yet, welcomes the cool air that envelops her lower extremities, a reprieve from the heat that her body is soaked in.
She is tired.
She wishes the walls of this tub would melt away and that the water were an ocean that she could float away in.
She wishes that lying down would relieve the weight she’s been carrying on her shoulders, as if it were a backpack…weight that feels extra heavy today.
Closing her eyes, she imagines that weight falling backwards into the white walls of the tub, giving her small frame and her soul a break for just a moment. And she floats, suspended in the warm, soapy basin.
The un-quiet of her mind quickly opens her eyes again and staring at the ceiling, she notices a spot of mildew. Her mind wanders to another task that needs tending; but she takes that thought and puts it on a leaf in her mind and watches it float down the river…“Not now…” she whispers.
“Not now” when the office calls for yet another “favor”, “Not now” when her mother starts to criticize, “Not now” when a girlfriend comes just to gossip, “Not now” when life asks for more than she can give.
Now, she tends to her “self”. Now, she takes a break. Now, she lets her body rest…and begs her mind to do the same. Now, she starts to heal.
She is not a laggard. She is a castaway who has given every ounce of energy her body could produce. And she is exhausted. Swimming without a life raft, tossed like debris in the angry seas of life, storms raging around her, head bobbing, she has surfaced from the crashing waves, but she is choking. In a moment of desperation, she reaches for a passing piece of driftwood and clutching it, she collapses. She is in survival mode.
She wishes it hadn’t come to this. She wishes it weren’t such a heavy blow which brought her to realize her self-worth…and self-preservation. She wishes she had reached for help sooner. She wishes she had saved more reserves for the swim. She wishes she felt more sure of the land she was floating towards.
Nonetheless, she is floating. After she rests, she will swim.
And then, one day, one day when her feet once again feel earth, she will run.
But not now…
Now, under the moon’s gentle light…in the quiet of an empty house, despite every lie the universe tries to whisper…she tells her self… “You are enough…right now.”
