I was away all day. All Day. I left at 8 and didn’t get home until after five, and when I came home I was tired. Tired. Oh, so tired.
It was a good day, an important day, a day talking about things I love, things I am passionate about, things I just might be able to do well.
But when I was finished, my jaw was tired, and my throat. My head, too, weary from thinking. And my body was heavy with a fatigue I didn’t understand. When I was standing, I thought I might want to sit, but then realized that wouldn’t do: I had been sitting for the better part of the day. But standing wouldn’t work, either, because– you’ll remember– I was tired.
I think what I wanted was soft horizontal space, and silence, and thinking about Nothing.
I couldn’t have that. I had to leave again, for class this time, at 5:45.
But there was a window in there, only a matter of minutes, really, when Emma Grace climbed onto my lap and sat there, facing away from me, eating a chocolate. We were in a friends’ kitchen, in the house where she and her brothers played all day while I was busy. And for those few moments, I rested: my arms wrapped around her familiar frame, my face buried in the blond hair that falls to her shoulders, inhaling the smell of her hair, her neck, her skin.
For those few minutes, in the kitchen of a friend, my girl on my lap, I was Home.
