What Was Worth it?

‎I am so tired.‎i am so tired I could kill myself just to be sure I'd get a good night's rest for once.‎The exhaustion has settled somewhere below my ribs and made a home there, and it pays its rent on my time.‎I've tried everything. I'm not someone who hasn't tried. I have revised and reapplied and networked and smiled in rooms where I had to remind myself to smile, had to consciously arrange my face into something that said I want to be here, I am grateful to be considered, please. I have read the articles and taken the courses and told myself the things you're supposed to tell yourself in the mirror. I have been so relentlessly, exhaustingly hopeful.But ‎I am still going back to the flat with the damp patch on the bathroom ceiling that my landlord has been meaning to fix for eight months, still sleeping under that ceiling because I have nowhere else to sleep. Still lying awake at 3 AM listening to the radiator knock and thinking about where I thought I'd be by now.‎I knew where I thought I'd be by now.‎And I am nowhere close. . . .‎The worst part I think, the part I don't tell anyone, the part that makes me feel like something is wrong with me at a structural level, is that I know I have things. I know I do. I know there are people who would look at my life and see shelter and food and a functioning body and think what is she crying about?‎I know that.‎And still. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I feel before I'm even fully conscious is this — this low, painful dread. This knowledge that today is not the life I meant to be living. That I have somehow ended up in the wrong place, over and over again, one small failed thing at a time until I looked up and didn't recognize any of it.‎I don't know how to explain wanting more without it sounding like greed.‎I don't know how to say I had a life in mind without someone reminding me of everything I should already be grateful for.‎So mostly I don't say it.‎I sit with it. Like I'm sitting with it now, on this bus, in this warm borrowed seat.‎. . .‎My mother used to tell me a story.‎I don't know why I'm thinking about it now. I haven't thought about it in years. Maybe I've been avoiding it, maybe there are things you don't let yourself think about when you're already too close to the edge.‎She said, "before we're born, God shows us our lives."‎Like a trailer. A glimpse of what's coming — the love and the loss and the ordinary terrible days and afternoons, the joy too, the joy that's going to be yours and no one else's. He shows us everything and then He asks.‎Do you want this? Will you go?‎And we say yes.‎We always say yes. That's what she said — that the mystery is not that life is hard, the mystery is that we saw how hard it would be and we said yes anyway. That something in the trailer was enough. Some face, some moment, some afternoon of such specific beauty that we looked at all the rest of it — all the grief we were signing up for — and said fine. it's worth it. I'll go.‎She told me this like it was supposed to be comforting.‎I'm sitting on this bus and I am trying to find the comfort in it and I can't. I can't. Because all I can think is —‎What did I see?‎What was in my trailer that made me say yes to this? To the exhaustion and the smile that was just a door closing and the damp ceiling and the 3 AM radiator and this loneliness, this particular dread of feeling old and behind and wrong, so consistently, so completely wrong about what my life was going to be?‎What did I see that was worth this?‎What did I know, before I was born, that I can't remember now from inside it?‎. . .‎I'm crying.‎My face is wet and my throat has closed around itself and the city outside the window goes liquid and I think not here, not here, not on this bus, not in front of all these people — but my body has stopped listening to me. It stopped listening a long time ago and I've just been too detached to acknowledge it.‎The sound that comes out of me is embarrassing. Small and wrecked. The sound of something that has been held in a space too small for it for too long.‎I can feel people looking.‎I know they're looking because the man in front of me goes very still, the way people go still when they feel uncomfortable or when they're deciding whether or not to intervene, and the woman across the aisle has stopped looking at her phone. I know I am the thing that has happened on this bus, the disruption, the woman crying into her coat sleeve on a cold afternoon.‎But I cannot stop.I cry for the blouse I ironed for the wretched interview and the forty minutes I spent in it, barely holding myself together, and all the other forty minutes before it and the plan I had that I can't find anymore, can't even remember clearly, but can only feel the outline of it like a bruise. I cry for my mother at the kitchen table in the house that doesn't exist anymore, hands around a mug, telling me I had chosen this life. I cry because I want to believe her. I cry because I did not choose this. I cry because maybe I did.‎I cry because somewhere, in some before-place, some version of me looked at all of this and said yes.‎And I want to find her.‎I want to grab her by the shoulders and ask her what she saw. I want her to show me. I want one moment of the trailer — just one — that explains why I'm still here, still trying, still getting on buses after failures, still ironing blouses the night before, still somehow, inexplicably, not done.‎What did you see?‎What did you know that I don't?‎What is still coming that made all of this worth saying yes to?‎I don't get an answer.‎How could I?‎I just cry. The bus moves. Someone near the front coughs. A child two seats back asks his mother something in a whisper and she whispers back.‎At some point the crying changes. It goes quieter, and runs deeper, and becomes the kind of thing that happens below the surface. I wipe my face with the back of my hand and stare out the window and try to breathe.‎I still don't know what I saw.‎I still don't know what's coming.‎But I'm on the bus. I'm still on the bus, going somewhere, the city scrolling past me through smeared glass.‎My stop is next.‎I'll get off. I'll walk back to the flat. I'll stand in the kitchen and make something to eat and listen to the radiator knock and I'll wake up tomorrow and I'll try again, because that's what I do, because apparently that is who I am, and I don't know yet if that makes me brave or stupid or just someone who hasn't figured out how to stop.‎Maybe there's no difference.‎Maybe that was always the trailer.‎This girl. She doesn't stop.‎Do you want her life?‎I press my forehead to the cold glass.‎I must have said yes.

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