Unable to save my father

i'm shattered

Mornin' people

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible.
It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do- determined to save the only life you could save.

-from devotions: the selected poems of mary oliver (2017)

By the middle of the week, I am tired of being a person. So on Thursdays, give me space to die a little in private. I don't want to go to the grocery store, fold laundry, wash a pan, or cut up artichokes for a salad. Let me sit quietly in a room alone with my knees folded to one side. I will retreat into myself, where I have resided obscurely through immeasurable and contrasting lives, all disorganized and stacked on top of cach other in the pit of my stomach. Sometimes, they spill out of my mouth like a sheet of ice because of you and your nagging fingers pulling at my bottom lip, hungry for me to tell you what I think before I know how to say it.
–intangible - madisen kuhn.