Me Cuesta

I was chopping cucumbers when it all came crashing down on me.  Tears slipped down my cheeks and I tilted my head toward the ceiling in an effort to forestall their descent onto the vegetables.  

I was listening to “The Daily” podcast, my usual dinner-making sound track.  The guest was a science reporter.  I don’t imagine she typically elicits tears from her audience.  But, she mentioned that the news of forthcoming vaccines has got her envisioning a time when her children may see their grandparents again.

With that one hopeful comment, the weight of this year came barreling over me.  Not for the first time, certainly.  But, this is how it goes.  In ambushes and sniper attacks, the magnitude of it arrives to remind me of all the loss, the dashed hopes, the uncertainty we’ve endured.

Even as I’m succumbing to the deluge, I feel a little guilty for struggling.  Ostensibly, I haven’t even suffered, really.  I know others have lost people they love.  I know that people are struggling under the weight of financial pressures.  I know people at this very moment are sick and afraid.  And, those have not been my story. 

I have fears and losses that are related to the virus.  But, I am not, at this moment, struggling with it directly.  And, yet, it has etched its contour into every crevice of my life.  This, also, is True.

There is a phrase in Spanish that plays on repeat in my mind right now: me cuesta.  It means that something is difficult for me.  “This thing is hard”.  But, literally, it means, “it costs me”.  And, right this moment, even the smallest things cost me in ways they never did before.

Every decision is laced with worry.  Every tiny act that would normally play out effortlessly: birthday parties, grocery shopping, getting to know a new city, now have to be weighed on the balance of risk.  Risk: that looming entity I’ve long been unaware of now makes its ominous presence known daily.

It is all so very exhausting.  Life is costly in a way I’ve never experienced, while simultaneously robbing me of so many of my sources of rejuvenation.

I don’t say any of this by way of complaint.  I don’t say it because I feel that the situation is somehow unfair or that some injustice has been perpetuated.  The balm of communal suffering is that there is no troubling “why me?” to face down.  There is simply the objective realness of it.

Therefore, I say this simply to acknowledge the truth of it.  To place it somewhere outside of my own weary heart.  The very act of saying of it—of extracting it from the confines of my soul and putting it here, into the world,  makes the unrelenting burden of it just a little bit lighter.

This is hard.

Me cuesta.

Me cuesta mucho.