So Tired of This.

"I am so tired of this."
She says as she waves her hands in a circle gesturing at the four walls of the room.
"It's like everyone's telling me where to go, how I feel, whose gotta live inside me and how I should live."
She rolls her sagged, smudged eyes and shakes her half-dyed tangles.
"I mean, I ain't got nowhere to go. I collect cans all day."
Her head wrenches back and an explosion of laughter exposes her missing teeth.
“Shit. Oh, excuse me, well, my lovely vocabulary. You’s probably good, going to church girls.”
Her hands drum the table, unbelievably restless at three in the morning.
"I have been through so much. I go to put my receipt for my cans and I'm getting beat up a bit..."
She stands demonstrating how she elbows other people. Another thrust of her elbow reveals a pudgy sag of skin peeking through the now beige fabric of a once green shirt. She starts laughing again.
"...and I get crop dusted. I go into the store and ya know people judge me. I walk in and everyone just psht. Psht."
She waves her arms like she is doing the chicken dance and continues her sound effects between chortles.
“They...everyone crop dusts me."
She sits as abruptly as her scrambled thoughts, staring past us. She jerks her large shoulders forward and her chin up.
“Everyone judge, but I know I am still just as beautiful even though I’ve been through it.”
She can’t sit still and folds in half as she cackles. She stands again continuing her constant, unreciprocated train of thought.
“I haven’t signed up for volunteer work here ‘cause I didn’t want to stay here. I don’t like it. In Bend I had a part, place. Man, I feel like I am losing parts of me here. Ya know what I mean?”
She looks over at me from the kitchen counter; seeing I am nodding, she sits back down and runs her weathered, ringed fingers through her hair.
“People tell me I am a dunderhead in my relationships. I have, or had, people I care about. And I’ve been beat up.”
She points to her missing teeth and her cranked voice is interrupted by another forced laughing episode.
“It’s not funny. It really isn’t.”
She snorts and her laughter dies off with her head shaking. She stiffens suddenly and stares at the ceiling.
“What is funny is I am losing the only thing I have left. My mind!”
Her eyes and smile are wildly wide as she gulps down her requested Dr. Pepper.
“It really gets to your head. I go collect cans and I am not with anyone and I come here and don’t connect with the other women.”
She rubs her eyes with her raisined knuckles.
“I sleep, I don’t sleep anymore. I can’t sleep any…”
Her sentence trails. Laughter throws her body into a combination of head bobbing and body rocking from her hips to her neck. The look of an epiphany stops her motion.
“No, no it’s not funny. Don’t ever do drugs. Don’t ever.”
She flings her index finger high into the air and then down to exaggeratingly pound each finger one at a time.
“Eleven months I’ve been doing this. Eleven.”
Looking at her tuna sandwich with eyebrows still raised she continues without checking if we are listening.
“People always have ideas about what I should do. Buy they, ha, I say they have a future!”
Her hands paddle the air as if to make room for each new thought.
“Those people don’t live here. Get along! Do better!”
She shuffles in the chair so she faces the direction of the rooms where the other women are asleep.
“You get up with a bunch of scratching chickens and try to make friends.”
Mumbling some more words needing excusing, she takes her plate to the kitchen ending her burble with a large belch and one final pause:
“I am so tired of this.”