Bone Tired

Some prewriting from the other day. I was exactly this tired, and decided to write down how it felt for future use.

When you’re tired -truly strung-out tired - your eyes get gritty and heavy and hot. When you blink it seems to take longer than you think it should, and you see hot red light behind your eyes, and everything becomes a little sharper in the middle and a little fuzzier around the edges – light is more acute, but images seem to dance around and you have to frown a little to figure them out. Your head slumps to your chest, you chest caves in on your stomach and your back just doesn’t want to support your torso anymore and there’s this weird hollowness in your chest, almost like being hungry, but not quite. Every time you move a finger or a leg or an arm you feel like you’re straining against weights, except the weight feels like it’s in your bones, not outside of you. You can’t breath right because your chest is all sunken in, and the breaths you do take feel like they’re going to migrate into sleepy breaths – deep, refreshing ones that don’t make any noise or really move your chest at all. And you feel like whenever you stop actively moving that all molecules in your body stop, too, and that any period of quiet non-moving you do is going to sink you into sleep. And if you do make the mistake of being quiet, and not moving, and closing your eyes, that red burny feeling behind your eyes suddenly becomes blue, and cool, and you feel like you’re falling, except it’s just your head that’s falling, and your spine sinking down even more. And you realize that your eyes have been closed – or that they’re really open but that you’re not seeing things anymore. And you get a kind of singlemindedness because you know that you have to concentrate and if you don’t you’ll just … stop.