Exhaustion

There's tired.  And then there's the kind of tired where your feet drag on the sidewalk, where the spoon drifts away between bowl and target.  Where you wish the chatter in your mind could be stilled long enough to sleep for eight hours - or even six. 

And you wonder: Perhaps the problem is only waiting to be solved until I stop mothering it.  Perhaps, if I were able to look the other way, the plants could creep from their hiding places underground and blossom into color.

Courage

It's almost worse when someone hurts you unintentionally and doesn't even know what they've done.  If they had set out to filet your soul, you can have some satisfaction.  You can lick the sour candy taste of pain from your mind; you can quietly dodge or take punches like a man; you can magnanimously forgive.  But there is no courage, no valor to be found in being hurt ignorantly.  There is only a sudden realization that you aren't as important as you thought -- and then nothing remains but to limp away slowly and prepare to be trod upon again.