Just a little taste of what I’ve been working on, inspired by the life of a caretaker.
“I am tired. Fatigued. Emotionally I want to breakdown into deep heaves, gasping for air through salted tears. I want to release all that I’ve been hanging on to. But I don’t.
The sun is shaded by the eves, where I sit two chaired (sitting in one chair and feet on another), feeling the need to rest. The need to escape from the emotional reality that stares at me from the other side of the window pane. She’s gaped forward reading, the way she always does before the words lull her to sleep, letting her heavy head dangle, straining the muscles in her back, neck, and shoulders.
In a little while, she will wake, forgetting all that had happened just moments before she picked up the newspaper. She will wander to the bathroom, before incontinence sends her into a plethora of emotions, and face the reality that she is not as young as she once was. She will cry from the exhaustion of simple tasks; standing, sitting, and tugging on her clothes. She will wonder why she can no longer do the things that were so easy to do long ago. She will attempt to look in the mirror, that has grown too high on the wall; when you shrink, the perspective of objects in the room change. She will wonder who the woman is that is staring back at her with the summer sun kissed face, the woman who’s glasses are always “just new,” and the woman who’s white hair seems too long. She will try hard to remember the woman in the mirror, and why she doesn’t understand what’s happening to her. The tears will continue to fall and her lungs will gasp for air as she slowly becomes a basket case, just moments before she loses it completely, just moments before I hug her and reassure her that she is in her own home, and minutes before she wonders why she’s crying at all.”
Becker, T. J. (2018). Knowing You. Unpublished manuscript.
Keystroke Stories 