L'Épuisement

Lyrics

[Intro]
My hands remember the shape. 
The pull of the thin skin from my own.
But not the hands they held today. 
Not one.

[Verse 1]
There's a space, you see, just behind the sternum.
Not a pain, not an ache. 
More like... an architecture. A room where something used to live.
They tell you to build walls, but mine was a well.
And the world was so thirsty.
I offered the rope, I offered the bucket, I offered the cool, dark water.
I gave them the stones that lined the sides.

[Chorus]
This isn't the fire going out. 
This is the well running dry.
This is the crack in the stone at the bottom, and the fine, grey dust.
It has a name now, a diagnosis for the echo.
Compassion fatigue. 
The quiet structural collapse.

[Verse 2]
Tuesday, three forty-five in the afternoon. 
The fluorescent lights hummed over the empty bed, the sheets too white.
The air smelled of fading lilies and sterile wipes.
In the break room, the coffee pot is a monument to a better idea.
At my kitchen table, I push food around my plate, trying to remember hunger.
Trying to feel the texture of my own life.
But the signal is lost.

[Chorus]
This isn't the fire going out. 
This is the well running dry.
This is the crack in the stone at the bottom, and the fine, grey dust.
It has a name now, a diagnosis for the echo.
Compassion fatigue. 
The quiet structural collapse.

[Bridge]
Charles Figley wrote it down in nineteen ninety-five. 
He called it a natural consequence. 
The cost of knowing. 
The stress of wanting to help, when helping is a floodgate.
This isn't a failure of the heart. 
It's the physics of the reservoir.
When the outflow is a torrent, and the inflow is a prayer for rain that never comes.

[Outro]
So I sit with the echo.
In the quiet architecture of the hollow.
My hands are cold now.
The bucket comes up empty.
And empty.
And empty.