One a.m., wide awake. I’m slipping back into an old pattern of not sleeping again, my body not physically able to feel tired at night, though in the mornings I can barely get through a paragraph in my book without my lids going heavy. When the sleep does come, it’s staccato and sweat-drenched.
I spend the hours horizontal but awake writing stories in my head, future plot lines for my life and the people in it. Sometimes the people not yet in it, too. Occasionally, they’ll pass me into sleep, but often my mind’s buzzing just prolongs my consciousness; I get scared to let the stories go because I should ride out being able to create, even if only conceptually, as long as I can. Because maybe I fear I’ll wake up one morning to the sound of my alarm—church bells—and that ability will be gone. Because maybe I fear that if I stop thinking through the stories, they’re less likely to come true.
The greatest irony, though: Busying myself with this adult-version of playing pretend is what often finally gets me to sleep, yet the reason I’m kept awake in the first place is my mind racing, chastising and worrying about not having been able to write lately.
All my life, I’ve spent time trying to find which bridges I need to build to get me where I want to go. Now that I’ve found so many of them, I’m shaken by the idea that, when the time comes to construct, my toolbox is all wrong.
MT
