Exhaustion as Inspiration

I find that nothing slips me into that delicious tortured artist persona quite like exhaustion. There is a quote I've always liked... something about write drunk, edit sober. I decided over a decade ago to live a sober life, I'd rather be intoxicating than intoxicated. Though I am neither. The closest inhibition I experience is from absolute fatigue. When I am so tired, everything pours out of me.

With exhaustion, I am in the full throes of existential melancholy. Every Sad moment of life lifts from my bones and settles over me like a fresh sheet drifting down around my body. That small whoosh of cool air rushing across my skin is the last of my sanity drifting away.

I become nothing.

My past trails behind me, wafts of smoke remains from the fire that consumed me. I let myself burn just to feel warmth. But ghosts don't feel warmth and ashes just drift away. Becoming invisible is how I learned to protect myself, to starve the destruction, but even silence can become its own prison.

No one can see past the unseen.

Eyes are caught up in the curated reality so believable you could get lost in it indefinitely. Everyone is watching but no one really sees.

I am unobserved, falling through life like it's a sieve. Nothing and no one can hold me. The hours stack into years, I have faded into nothing more than pencil markings rubbed raw by pink rubber erasers.

No one knows my name, no one knows my heart. I cannot be loved if I cannot be perceived. But I also cannot be hunted, devoured or damaged.

The only hurt I endure is that of non-existence. A slow ache much more tolerable to the excruciating burn of my past.

I can live in the shadows, I can breathe in the dark. I can even dance barefoot flinging my hair wildly and enjoy the freedom the comes from being imperceptible. Maybe that's a gift, maybe that's all I will be given in life.