you know that feeling when your phone just vibrates and vibrates a little angry buzzing on the bedside table and you just watch it knowing exactly what it is a family calling about something awful that happened or is happening right now and you just let it go to voicemail because it’s your day off and the sun is trying to shine through the thin curtains but you’re still so tired from the week you just spent putting out fires and patching up wounds with spit and sticky tape and you just lie there listening to the hum of the fridge downstairs remembering how many shifts it took to buy it on sale and how the electricity bill is due tomorrow and thinking how much better it would feel to just pull the blanket over your head and pretend the world isn’t crumbling outside it’s like being a lighthouse keeper with a broken bulb sometimes you can see the ships floundering in the dark but you just don’t have another light to give you feel that cold dread in your stomach that tight knot behind your ribs when another notification flashes across the screen another name another emergency another child or parent or young person who needs someone to pick up and you just don’t have it in you not today you’ve already given every piece of yourself this week every kind word every exhausted smile every last drop of patience and you look at your hands and they just feel empty like cupped water that’s already seeped through your fingers and you know it’s so selfish you know it’s just the worst kind of person to ignore the cries for help but there’s nothing left to give nothing and then the anger starts to bubble not at them never at them but at everything else at the system that relies on people like you burning themselves to ash at the fact that you can’t afford to just live without this constant drain without the weight of other people’s desperation always pressing down on you at the sheer nerve of the world for expecting you to always be okay to always have the answers to always be the one who saves the day when you can barely save yourself sometimes when all you want is just one single day where the phone doesn’t ring and the world doesn’t demand another piece of you and the bills aren’t staring you down from the kitchen counter it’s just this suffocating feeling like you’re drowning but you’re supposed to be throwing the life raft to everyone else it’s just so unfair