Tender Ache of Exhaustion

Tender Ache of Exhaustion

Life feels kissed with the greatest gifts.
To have truly known deep love, deep connections,
and passionate communion with others and with the world.
I’ve been blessed with purpose and creative skill,
and I live on the most enchanting island,
where each breath feels charged with meaning and presence.
All these divine gifts, and still, there are moments of quiet unraveling.

These are not days of storms.
They do not bring heaviness I must fight away.
They bring a stillness that says:
"You have walked far enough."

On those days, my spirit rests quietly,
melancholy whispering softly beneath the surface.
I seek no words or movement,
held instead by a gentle sense of completion,
as if a chapter softly closes within me.

I’ve witnessed many forms of chaos,
borne witness to joy and grief in equal measure.
And sometimes I wonder.
Perhaps I’ve truly walked through enough.
Life has been generous to me.
And maybe it is no longer necessary to keep walking
just to prove I can bear the weight of duality a little longer.

There’s a thought that visits gently.
What if it’s okay to say goodbye on your own terms?
What if fulfillment can also be an ending?

I breathe in deep and sit with the possibility.
It doesn’t arise from pain.
It doesn’t arise from fear.
It arises from a place that feels whole.

I have lived a full life.

But then again.

Maybe this honorable notion of farewell,
this graceful exit I imagine,
is just a protective veil.
A shield I’ve made to soften a harder truth:
that I’m simply tired. Deeply, deeply tired.

Maybe beneath all this clarity is just a weariness
that has rooted itself in my bones.
A sadness that drifts in and out like a tide.

Maybe this is grief still echoing through me.

For how much love and loss a single life can carry.

Who knows?

Perhaps both are true.
I will honor both possibilities.
I will let them sit beside me.
The wise, measured farewell
and the tender ache of exhaustion.