And lead us not into resignation

I work most days of the week--eight hours that evaporate into a nothingness and leave checks behind. I endure the nothingness to pick up the checks.

Dismal, maybe. But my alternative is to waste away into the long hours of pain in a bare house--my method of coping squeezes the hours into a nothingness that leaves behind an inexplicable weight, a sad gravity.

It is when my mother complains. Her brown eyes faded into a gray shriek at the top of her irises, pigment sinking into the circles underlining her tired lids. I watch them blown wide, emotive, screaming at her depressed son, her insomniac daughter.

It is in my sister's resignation. The way her thoughts pervade and plague her, confounding, angry that she cannot cram her pretty ideals anywhere she wants them. When she is faced with a decision and offers up meekness, weakness--at first angry, and then depressed.

It is in my brother's solitude. In his private room and private games until he crumples into his shows and Stevie Wonder, finding refuge beneath them until he does not feel a failure creeping behind him with every step. When he rages--refuge is not enough--I feel the knot in my stomach, churning and crying for an emptiness, for a sheer lack of happiness. A fog.

It is in all of this stagnation that I want to rise up and infuse drive into each of them. I realize every time that they find drive on their own, that it is the only reason for their existence, that they persist and stride against the sad gravity that pulls them back toward the center of unmoving--the center where we all reside at the dinner table, silent and spiteful.