Sheer energy reflects all of the strength I accumulated over forty years so the six year old inside of me can continue to vacuum all of the information under her. The sound of the vacuum calms me down. Most of the information from the shag carpet right under her curled up body is gone. I have sucked it dry through the bottoms of my feet, my sacral threshold. It’s like food but the opposite.

Friends came over for dinner the other day and we talked about diets designed for gastrointestinal issues. I don’t know how true this is but as a hypothesis it made a lot of sense:

In Asian cultures, you might find certain foods harsh on the system, and deal with it by adding antidotal inputs. If meat is tough on your stomach, you dilute it with rice. If spices are intense you make sure to eat fennel seeds after your meal. In European cultures, however, you eliminate the offending subject. “I’m allergic to bloating and therefore I never touch wheat.” I am, of course, not suggesting celiac isn’t a real illness, but rather that in a lot of Asian cultures, for better or worse, people will keep eating things that irritate their system or worse make them sick (viz: Asian beer flush face), and keep consuming them but add other things.

I am a kind of “tired” I have never experienced in my life. Sleepy beyond description from a sadness choking my body up, like a gluten. I am exhausted in a way I have never been in my life because of a child that has taken to waking me up anywhere between 3am and 5am for the past two weeks. Sheer energy, pure love, unadulterated emotion reflects all of the strength required to protect my sleeping inner child. Leave her alone, I seem to be screaming at everybody.

It’s really hard.

All this girl wants is to lie on the tremor line of earth and feel the hardest, deepest and softest vibration of the earth rearrange every cell in her body so that it comes back able to eat anything she wants in abundance. Like a vacuum, as effective at its primary function—to consume—as it is in its secondary—to lull me with its sound. I will be the sound if the little girl promises to keep eating.