I can't sleep.

I have to be awake in five hours, but it's of no matter because I can't escape my waking mind right now.

I recieved word this morning that I got a short story published; I've published poems, but this is my first story, and I'm very excited.

So excited, I can't sleep.

The story is loosely based on someone I knew in college. The dialogue is just how we would talk; the tension is familiar to a good amount of people I used to know.

I keep thinking of all the stories of the people I used to know, the person I used to be.

I keep thinking of all the stories I could tell, and I've been working on one recently.

Tonight, I sewed until 9; then I hung out with my husband; then I worked on my story until now.

Now, I'm thinking of all the stories I've hidden around our home. All those journals. All those old letters. 

Today, while I was reading Carver, Tim told me I've had some good success as an artist this week. 

Later, as we walked through the grocery store, putting food back on the shelves that we couldn't afford, Langston kicking his legs in the cart and a storm about to break outside. We're living the life of artists, we said. Artists that work over forty hours a week. We are so broke. We laughed. It's not the same as it used to be, Tim said. We are happy, but we want more time. 

We do things in hopes we will get it, but it keeps going. 

I get sad about the world, the world we are leaving to Langston; Tim tells me it is better than it has ever been. He gives me reasons why. I don't know if he believes those reasons, but I married him because he does that. He is perpetually love; he perpetually gives kindness, thought, balance... 

I think of how I used to think that screaming the loudest meant safety. 

Tim tells me to tell the stories; he begs me to write them. He says no one could ever believe they're not fiction. 

But those stories turn me into a historian; they remind me of wasting away my twenties; being devoured by people that were weak and cruel. 

I don't know if I want those stories. 

I remember hating Molly Peacock for a long time after I read her nonfiction book. I remember hating her for her sister's sake; there were so many excuses.

I'd like to stare straight at something and write it.

I'd like a secret message.

I'd like to see something real that I'd seen some time previously, all those years folded on themselves,

all those years I spend away, chasing things. Being stopped all the time, all along by strangers giving me good things and ignoring them all.

I want to write the parts I know and forget then forget their truths.

I'd like to sleep tonight without dreaming. 

dream team.

little ghost

woke up at 4a again this morning for no truly good reason. i decided to drive to the gas station because i needed gas and figured it would be easier at 4a. i do this. i have these months on end when i cannot sleep more than 3h a night and mostly i am terribly productive, sometimes slightly spacy. ever since i was 19 i have been keeping these patterns. for the past six months or so i slept a lot. but now it is the 4a patterns and being out where all i seem to run into are night watchmen on their ways and partiers on their ways or sleepy eyed workers on their ways. they have reasons to be at these hours and mostly i just feel like a wanderer.

this is not to say that i dislike not sleeping. most of the time, i enjoy all of the dark hours. i write my best work when i am not sleeping and feel the healthiest when sleep holds the smallest parts of my days. karl lagerfeld hardly sleeps at all and he keeps it together in a terribly fine way.

my dad always says i like to know a lot about a lot of things and that i've always been this way. in most ways, i find this way of being on my side. it makes the separate, spatial parts of the world relatable. it makes it easier for me to point and name, to find distinctions and similiarities, to be exceedingly black and white about people to be very off and on (my dad also says i see no grey when it comes to dealing with people, but i do not feel that way, for me, most people in my life are all grey. all hazy. all background. all talking walls.).

lately i have been thinking a tremendous lot about people that probably do not think i think of them at all. people that probably would not care either way and i do not care enough to say, hey, i think about you because it does not matter beyond the thinking. there is no real world relevance or relation here, and i would never want there to be. i like my separate parts. i like to keep the world separate. it is only when it all comes crashing in that i do not feel like myself as part of the world anymore. it is too distinctive. too isolated. but it cannot be helped.



super sleep &the dream team

for some reason, when i workout everyday &eat homemade, healthy things, and take really excellent care of my body & mind, i can never sleep. never. ever. ever. sleep. no matter how sleepy i am and how sleepy my brain wants to be and how much those little day dreams want to put the paper moon up in my skull  and pull the shades over my eyes, these things do not happen. instead, i am a dumbstruck zombie reading french novels at 3a and painting my nails and just spacing out on old thoughts and spacing out on things that do not even matter to me. it is like my psyche is wandering through dark and drafty rooms. like my brain is in that old Wuthering Heights mansion visiting all of the old ghosts and madmen for no good reason at all except that it is dark and silent and there is no one else to talk to except the ghosts and the french novelists and the madmen.

one last caress

i feel like and look like i slept all of six minutes last night, which would not be so far from the truth and so far from the norm for most any friday i suppose, except the biker bar just got a paint job and that toxic enamel smell and all those blinking ghouls the nicotine and beer all fried my insides for the morning. i am probably listening to more of the misfits the cramps and the damned more than anyone probably should. ever wake up singing i got something to say, i killed your baby today and it doesn't matter much to me as long as it's dead. yikes. that's too much for any morning to handle. even halloween saturday weekend mornings especially when one likes kids and would never eats them. but i probably like kids as much as i like danzig. tomato tomato.

so we should listen to the business together. maybe we are having the same morning and we both need more misfits in our lives. i should be danzig for halloween. i will just run around topless in tight pants and black eyeliner.

sleep zombie.

yesterday after class i knocked out for an hour and was a space cadet all afternoon and evening. i went to my parent's house because my dad is still real sick and my dad is still real down and i suppose i went to cheer him up and make him dinner.

the cheer up part, in most,  i think i can thank for this great grandmother that was arrested at walmart for stealing a bag of cookies while on a retirement home outing. the best part about this great grandma was her mug shot and her sailor mouth, which, one can tell from the photo, was nonstop. if i were a grandma i would probably steal cookies too. i mean, what's left? 

go through hours and days in dresses in heels raising a million kids, might as well get a record in those twilight years. or take up graffiti or something. old people do a lot of nutty things and then they get to blame it on being senile or from another time or something. 

i have never ever ever looked forward to getting old, but i suppose this could be some benefit. eh, i don't know. my dream of dreams is to own a full bedroom set that is completely covered in antique mirrors and glass knobs. i have always always wanted to live in a prism. but just the other day i was thinking about how old i will be when i can actually afford something like that, and how i may not want to look in the mirror anymore by then. 

like this: i want a stark, raving room.

ian thought this was terribly funny. life is so extraordinarily stupid like that. i constantly have this feeling of being my own pet project and running all of these very dumb experiments on myself. it is probably easier to take yourself seriously than not.

so i still have not slept minus that nap yesterday and i feel like a sick-stomach little zombie because i am sick with a stomach flu or something and nothing good comes of this i just don't sleep and none of my clothes fit properly because i turn into this little shrinking ghost. 

 i think i am so sick from worrying about my dad, but i wouldn't tell him that.

neatneatneat

i have not slept for three days now, minus hour long naps here and there. when i wake i wake disappointed because though the dreams are tumultuous, the hands have hardly moved. the world is just crawling and frantic. right now i am completely submerged in Atwood's work, not as a reader (though i did reread her collection Morning in the Burned House at 4a this morning) but i am researching vision and voice for an article that my professor is working on.

i moonlight alot. i think my entire life is moonlighting and i absolutely hate when i am talking to someone and they coin a new term for what they are doing, as some grand stand, when the definition is always the same. i like my moonlighting more than anything though (as an assistant, as a seamstress, as a writer a poet a dog walker as a dancer), even though i keep hearing how smart i am, i feel very worried about my brain. like it is not going to live up to the perception. like i've been free wheeling and free thinking for far too long and i will not be able to put the chords back together and make the right sound. i am awful at standardized tests. really, a real dunce. i do not try in the fact that i do not study, but i do not study because i could never figure out how to approach it. maybe that is why my french is so clumsy, because my brain did not learn on those sounds and now, though the words look so perfect and lithe on the page, in my mouth they are marbles. maybe i dont know. maybe i should not say that.