I wanted to stop carrying everyone’s tone home

Dear Delyara, I think this is one of the quietest ways I get exhausted. People’s tones stay with me. The hurried one. The disappointed one. The one trying not to sound sharp and still sounding sharp. The over-bright one that is hiding something. The polite one with pressure under it. By the time I come home, I feel inhabited by more voices than my own. Tonight I needed silence not because I had nothing to say, but because I had too much of other people still in me. That’s a hard kind of tiredness to explain to anyone who doesn’t feel tone this way.