Little Labors

Wiped out

I used to sometimes find myself saying, “I’m wiped out.” After the puma was born I would very rarely, maybe never, say I was “wiped out.” Though I often thought to myself, It’s okay, I should just accept that I’m wiped out. Maybe the puma had a cold, which disturbed her sleep, and so it had been weeks since I had slept more than an hour without interruption — there was always something, but also it was nothing, or, at times, I was nothing. As the instances of thinking of myself as “wiped out” accrued, I became sensitive to the phrase’s hyperbolic overlap with, say, a species being “wiped out.” And also to the fact that if at any given moment I introspected, I was likely to discover that I felt “totally wiped out” and so the sense of wiped out being a state that was relative to some other non-wiped-out state had been lost; the meaning of “wiped out” had been wiped out. The phrase began to fade. Though I did, as if bartering, sometimes find myself imagining a woman continually wiping dry an irremediably damp table. Then one day recently I noticed I wasn’t that wiped out, and I noticed this because I saw that the puma had a dishtowel and she was using it to wipe at water she had poured onto the floor.