It has been a hard week.

There are days when I can’t absorb any more.  Sometimes the clients actually radiate pain.  I see it all over them (it’s red).  If I’m paying close attention, and have the phone on “Do Not Disturb.”  If the office doors are shut and I’m holding one of the good pens.  If the notepad is located just so and the office is quiet. 

I  can hear their pain.  Not with my ears, with my skin. 

Not every time or all the time.  Just sometimes, when there’s pen and paper and quiet.  Their story has ended.  The scary thing has happened.  It is worse than they could have imagined.  Or, even worse for me, it is a complete surprise to them.

Then they leave, and I am just done.  It’s time to switch gears, pick up something else, or return a phone call.  I should be signing my daughter up for dance.  I should be making a grocery list because our fridge looks like a college boy lives in our house, not a family of 4.  I really should be rescheduling that dentist appointment, because I don’t want my sweet dentist to have to prepare a “Subpoena” demanding my presence at his office . . . like last time.

But I can’t do all that shit.  Because I’m done.  My soul hurts.

I take a break to smoke some crack.  Not really, I just look at Facebook, again.  And all over, people are praying for things, and celebrating things, and vacationing at great places.  People are taking pictures in their bikinis.  What the hell is this?  Don’t they know we got old?  Some of them are having babies and naming them weird names and some of them are naming their babies the same names as everybody else's baby.   I do not know which is worse – weirdname or commonname.

Not sufficiently distracted, I scan the news headlines.  And I see it.  The story about the Brooklyn boy.  Someone’s boy baby.  Someone’s 9 year old baby who got lost and needed help.  A boy who ended up in pieces.  In a man’s apartment nearby. 

My heart goes straight to his mother.  Did she push her nose into his hair in the morning and smell the love-smell of him?  Did he let her touch his eyelashes?  Did she swoon when she applied sunscreen to his back, because the sweet miracle of this boy was too much to endure?  And because he stayed still long enough to let her touch him?

My skin hurts this week.

Sorry.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.  Psalm 34:18