Words have always served as a source of comfort for me, the way they embrace each other one by one linking arms so they can hold you. It’s why I have always put so much effort into trying to say the right thing. But sometimes no matter how much I try, nothing sounds right, the words just keep tripping over one another, awkwardly and without grace. It has taken me a long time to recognize that the clumsiness is just honesty with a fear of public speaking.

“How are you?”

My answer has not changed in the last couple of months but today it is spoken with the denotation of the word sinking into my face under my eyes.

“Heavy.”

Everything has been awfully heavy lately hasn’t it? I am so tired it hurts. There’s this poet who describes life as “this heavy humanness.” I think about this all the time. I think about the weight we carry existing, just being alive, how it is inevitable and inescapable and unending… until of course it ends.

I think about the heaviness, how so much of the weight we carry isn’t even ours to bear, how we collect pieces and pain from the people we love, piling it onto our backs, rearranging our existing weight just to make space. The weight is deliberate and intentional, carried without hesitation or regret, even if it digs into our shoulder blades, even if our knees begin to tremble. It’s the weight of inside jokes and homemade dinners and “Did you make it home safely?” texts. It’s the weight of sleepless nights and hospital prayers and “I miss you’s” greeted by silence. I think about this weight, how we bear it as our own until it is. We hold onto to it even when we feel our fingers slipping, and we never let go, not even if they leave.

I’m beginning to think maybe the heaviness is indistinguishable from the humanness, that suffering is indistinguishable from love.
There’s this dialogue in the translation of a Greek play by Euripedes between the hero Orestes and his companion Pylades.
Pylades tells Orestes, “I’ll take care of you.”
To which Orestes replies “it’s rotten work.”
And then Pylades insists “Not to me. Not if it’s you.”

I think about the weight we carry existing, just being alive and sometimes I forget what a privilege the heavy humanness is, that heaviness can be a synonym for magnitude.

The rotten work was never rotten.
The grief will always be love.
It is not suffering, not to me, not if it’s you.

Thank you for this heavy humanness, for lingering indefinitely. It is inevitable and inescapable and unending… until of course we meet again.