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Shrug
What can one say about a sigh that wouldn’t conjure associations of the sentimental and romantic?
It is the favored image of longing. My dictionary defines it as an audible exhalation "as from sorrow,
weariness, or relief." It even defines it as to "yearn or long." But in the everyday world of traffic
jams, cubicles and deadlines, one hears them and their telling variety. There are short ones, long ones,
those that are light like a whisper and others that are vocalized like a grunt. On the elevator, from behind the
wheel, in a meeting they punctuate sentences, thoughts and, more importantly, the salvos of the emotional battle
each quietly wages. Of the words in my dictionary’s definition, one term surfaces as expressing the more common
variety of sigh: weariness.
In the office where I work, three people come to me in succession all needing large amounts of work done in short
periods of time and all due at the same time. The irritation of each grows as I explain that only so much can be done
and someone’s work cannot be done by the expected time. However, the impossibility of the task does not concern them.
To them, there are no excuses. They leave intending to report me. I sigh.
It is not simply an expression. It is not simply saying, "I am tired of this." It is an attempt to expel a
foreign object from the body: the burden of unreason. The sigh is a kind of expectoration. But it is also an attempt to carry on.
That is to say, it is also a kind of emotional shrug.
Carrying a heavy load over long distances, one can redistribute the weight on the shoulders by shrugging.
That is what a sigh is: a redistribution of the weight, a shifting of the load that is bearing down on you.
The heavier the load, the greater the effort needed to shrug. One can hear it in the nature of the sigh.
A former co-worker who, sadly, fell into manic-depression, showed evidence of his descent in the nature of his sighs.
In the beginning, they were no different from anyone’s except, perhaps, in their frequency. They were the un-vocalized,
short bursts of air thrust from the body like phlegm. But gradually they grew longer in duration, and fell deeper into the throat.
Finally they reached the larynx and became vocalized, long, dark, and heavy. It was shortly after this that his condition was diagnosed.
I recalled the change in his sighs. They changed the way a dying man’s breathing changes. First there’s the normal tension,
perhaps a shallow whistle from the throat. Then the breath grows more difficult and labored.
It wheezes. Finally, it rattles.
What is evident is that the romantic sighs of a lover are rare. The more common sigh does not express longing at all.
Or, if it expresses longing, it is a longing to escape, a yearning for reasonable demands to replace the unreasonable ones,
to replace the seemingly infinite demands placed upon a creature whose strength is finite. Perhaps it is even the sigh of
one praying for more strength, for one can only shrug against a burden one is able to carry.
Michael T. Young's
poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Home Planet News, The MacGuffin, NYCBigCityLit,
RATTLE, Spillway, and many other journals. His most recent collection is Transcriptions of Daylight.
He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received the Chaffin Poetry Award for 2005.
His work is also in the anthologies Phoenix Rising and Chance of a Ghost.
He currently lives with my wife in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Email: Michael T. Young
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