Exhausted

The sidewalk came up fast. Good thing I decided against wearing that skirt. I rolled into the grass. Everything collapsed. My hands went numb and I could not breathe. I could not talk. One eye stopped moving. A finger in my face, telling me to follow. They pulled back my eyelid. I couldn’t follow.

The pain crept up my stomach. Elevate my legs. From a distance, it looks like I am merely relaxing under a tree in the park. I could be dying.

“Come on, Ashley. Get up. Try.”

She doesn’t understand that I can not move. At all. She picks me up and I drop again like a ragdoll. It hurts in some places. And in other places, I can not feel at all. To faint would have been a mercy, but I was conscious through all of it: the breathlessness, the pain, the dizziness. And I realize I am tired and I do not care.

Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. Can’t move. The world spins. Pain again. I almost cry. Am I dying? Who cares? I realize no one cares. Not even me.

Because this is the kind of world I live in. My world. Which is not a world at all.

I lay there for an hour, unable to move. They try to make me drink. Eventually, I walk unsteadily to a filthy truck with a man who can not stop talking. Thorns are in my hair. And leaves. And I smell like sweat.

She thinks it’s heat exhaustion. It wasn’t even hot. It was exhaustion. It was walking too far on a medication that will shut your body down. You aren’t supposed to stand long on this medication. You can’ t be on your feet for hours. But she kept pushing me to walk and walk and walk . . . then yelled at me when I collapsed . . . I hate her some days. Some days I hate her.

It was no heat exhaustion. It was exhaustion.

I’m tired of being.