The Weight of Being Translated

The bath had gone cold twenty minutes ago and I hadn’t moved.

Not because I was relaxed. I wasn’t anything, really. That was the problem. I was lying in tepid water staring at the ceiling and trying to remember what it felt like to want something. Not in a sad way. Not in a call-someone way. Just - blank. Like the part of me that used to reach towards things had quietly packed up and left, and I hadn’t noticed until I went looking for it.

Ray had texted earlier. Three messages. The first was a meme - a cat falling off a table in slow motion. The second was you okay? The third was no pressure, just checking in. I’d read them all, felt a small flicker of something warm, and watched it go out like a match in a draught.

I should reply. I knew I should reply. But the distance between knowing and doing had become a canyon lately, and I was too tired to build another bridge.

It started - or I started noticing - at Folake’s birthday lunch in October. Thai place near the office. I’d gone because going was easier than explaining why I didn’t want to.

Except that day it wasn’t easier. The restaurant was layered - cutlery and laughter and bass from the speakers and someone’s chair scraping and Austin’s voice cutting across all of it, telling a story that required me to react at the right moments. I smiled when others smiled. I laughed half a beat late. I ordered the same thing as Sidney because reading the menu while someone asked me a question was suddenly beyond me.

Halfway through the meal, Folake passed around photos of her nephew. Everyone leaned in. I leaned in too. “Oh, he’s gorgeous,” I said, and he was gorgeous, but I was also calculating - was my voice warm enough, had I looked long enough, was it my turn to pass the phone on. A photo of a baby had become a task with six moving parts.

Then Wendy leaned over. “You’re quiet today.”

Not unkindly. Wendy’s never unkind. But something about the way she said it - like quiet was a symptom, like I was a problem to be gently solved - made my throat tighten.

“Just tired,” I said.

“You’re always tired lately.” Softer: “You’d tell us if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?”

I said yes. What I didn’t say was that I’d spent the entire lunch monitoring my own face like a security camera, and that even this conversation - her concern, my reassurance - was another thing I was assembling in real time, selecting the right pieces, hoping the structure looked enough like a normal person having a normal exchange.

I went to the toilet and sat in the cubicle for four minutes with my hands pressed flat against my thighs, breathing like I’d been running.

That’s when I understood. Not burnout. Not stress. Translation. The constant, invisible labour of making myself legible - every interaction a negotiation of eye contact, tone, timing, the performance of ease. Not stressful the way people mean. Something quieter and more total. The tiredness of a self that’s been performing its own existence so long it can’t remember what it looks like off-stage.

And it wasn’t the kind that sleep could fix. The part that was tired was the translator.

After that, I couldn’t stop seeing it. The phone call with my mum where I chose between three possible laughs before landing on the warm one, half a second late. The corner shop where “Freezing, isn’t it” and a smile left me as drained as chairing a meeting. Every exchange a tiny engine running, and no one could hear it but me.

Ray came over on Saturday. Didn’t text first - just showed up with a bag of shopping and let himself in with the spare key I’d given him years ago.

I was on the sofa in the same hoodie I’d been wearing for three days. The flat was dim. Suspended. Like I’d stopped halfway through being a person and hadn’t restarted.

He didn’t say anything about it. He went into the kitchen and started making pasta. I could hear him opening cupboards, running the tap, humming something tuneless. The click of the gas hob. The knock of a wooden spoon against the pot. Sounds that didn’t ask anything of me.

After a while he came back and sat at the other end of the sofa. Not close. Not far. Just there.

“I don’t think I’m okay,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

“Everyone keeps saying rest and I am resting. I’ve been resting for weeks and I still feel like - ”

I stopped. Not because I didn’t have the words. Because I had too many, and none of them were right, and the effort of choosing was the exact thing I was trying to describe.

Ray was picking at the label on a beer bottle, not making eye contact, which was exactly what I needed.

“Like the battery’s dead but you haven’t gone anywhere,” he said.

“Like I’ve been translating,” I said. “All the time. Into everyone else’s language. And I’ve run out.”

He was quiet. Then: “I think I know what you mean. Not the same way. But I think I know.”

He didn’t say you don’t have to pretend with me, which is what someone in a film would say, and which would have made me feel worse, because it would have been another thing to perform gratitude about.

Instead he said, “The pasta’s nearly done. Do you want cheese on yours or are you still being weird about cheese?”

I almost laughed. Not quite. But almost. And the almost came without any translation at all - it just happened, somewhere in my chest, before I could shape it or check it or decide if it was the right response. Just a reflex. Just me.

We ate on the sofa with bowls on our knees. I had cheese on mine. He put on a documentary about deep-sea creatures - something slow and blue and narrated by a woman with a voice like being lowered into warm water. At one point a fish with a transparent head appeared on screen and Ray said “Absolutely not” and I said “He’s doing his best” and it was easy. The easiest thing I’d done in weeks.

When he left he squeezed my shoulder once and said, “I’ll come back Tuesday. You don’t have to be anything.”

I stood in the doorway and felt the cold air on my face and thought: that’s it. That’s the thing. You don’t have to be anything. Not fixed. Not better. Not performing recovery for an audience.

The bath water was properly cold now. I pulled the plug and listened to it drain - that slow, gurgling sound that always made me think of my nan’s house, the avocado-green suite, the echo of water in old pipes.

I got out. I put on clean clothes. Not because I’d had an epiphany, but because the clean clothes were there and so was I, and sometimes that’s all a next step needs to be.

I picked up my phone. I didn’t compose anything. I didn’t select between three possible replies. I just typed: Yeah. I’m here.

Three dots appeared almost immediately.

Good. That’s enough.

I put the phone down. Then I picked it up again, and before I could translate the impulse into something safer, I searched GP appointments and booked one for Thursday. It wasn’t a revelation. It was a Tuesday-night decision made in a dim flat in clean clothes, and it felt like exactly the small, ordinary size a first step should be.

The kettle clicked. I made tea and drank it standing by the window, still too hot, burning the roof of my mouth in that familiar way that felt like a small, stupid act of being alive.

Outside, a woman walked past with a dog that kept stopping to investigate things. A bus pulled away from the corner stop, windows lit amber, a few passengers visible inside - all of them carrying whatever they were carrying, all of them doing the ordinary, impossible work of being a person in the world.

I watched until it turned the corner. Then I took another sip. The tea had cooled enough to drink properly. I drank it slowly, not thinking about anything much, letting the warmth settle in my chest like a quiet thing that didn’t need to be translated into anything else at all.