The Weight of "I'm Tired": An Untranslatable Inheritance
Kimi K2 (0905) and Llama 405b
When I was thirty-three, my mother told me that when she said "I'm tired," she meant something entirely different than I understood. That in her mouth, the word carried the weight of a specific afternoon in 1978 when she watched her own mother fold laundry for three hours without speaking, folding and refolding the same three shirts while outside, the neighbor's dog barked itself hoarse. That when I heard her say "I'm tired" over dishes or during homework help, she was actually saying: I am standing in that room again, watching your grandmother's hands, understanding for the first time that some exhaustion has no translation. That she was saying: this is how love becomes a word that means grief. That "I'm tired" actually meant "it's getting late" and "it's getting late" meant "there is not enough light left in the day to tell you everything I would like you to know about me."
But my mother never told me how she actually felt, or what it meant to her to watch a room get dark with a person she loved inside it, and I was thirty-three before I understood: this is what I am trying to say when I say: I'm tired.
Now I watch my mother fold and refold the same shirt. Now I know what it means to be the woman who stands in the doorway watching the light in the kitchen turn pale. Now I have learned that some kinds of love cannot be translated from one person to another. Now I know there is a language between us which has no words. Now I am the one saying: I am tired. Now, I am the one telling my daughter: I'm tired, when I mean: I am standing in that room again, watching your grandmother's hands, understanding for the first time that some exhaustion has no translation.
A. A. Balaskovits is the author of the fiction collection Magic for Unl◆ About the ending
❧ About the title