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Deadweight
I awoke heavy today, yesterday, and the day before. I can't remember when I didn't feel this way, but I know I have. The scale, as always, reads 142 pounds. I'm five foot, nine inches tall. Weight proportionate to height.
Still, my feet sink in the carpet deep as footprints in sand. Loud as my father's stomps on hardwood, flat-arched and ponderous, shaking the glass windows just as the storm surf crashing on the reef did. The heavy dread of giant footsteps approaching my bedroom door.
Weight can't always be measured in pounds. The baby falling asleep on my belly grows heavy. As if consciousness takes up space between her cells and upon departing, leaves the body more dense, trusting.
Or the lover's arm across my chest which grows heavy. Like a lead blanket in the X-ray room, comforting. But I have no child, no lover. This weight does not feel like trust. It's not comforting.
Deadweight is the unrelieved weight of an inert mass. So says Webster's New Collegiate. Inertia is a property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion unless acted upon by some external force.
My passion for life has eroded away, grain by grain, into a sea of complacency. But I can't wait for an external force to throw my 9-to-5 train off its tracks. Prince Charming, the lottery, a natural disaster.
I must do something to disrupt my redundant orbit and spin my world recklessly, erratically, wondrously out of control. And reclaim the lightness of my life. For I cannot be like helium, inert, yet nearly weightless.
By Monique Cole
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