As the hours pass into darkness, I find myself obscured by the dark shadows of my clouded past. Certainly, there were silver linings to be enjoyed, but for all the rain that pours down upon me, often I find myself still wanting for a cool refreshing rain. Instead, the raindrops felt like little pins and needles falling to spite only me while seeming to clink harmlessly off others around me. 

Perhaps there is too much anxiety revolving around a great many uncertainties that fester within the deeper recesses of my skull, keeping me awake far later than I should allow myself to most nights. But it seems that my better judgment finds it subconsciously more advantageous to remain awake to avoid the plagues of recurrent nightmares brought on by the overstimulated memories of a life that seems to have been so much stranger than fiction; yet it entirely came to pass in such a disconnected and cruelly unscripted way, as such to make my own right to choose my own way no longer sacrosanct. There are too few hours to find restfulness during darker hours, as the very cover of night seemingly allows demons to creep into my unconscious and scare me off from any hope of a restful sleep.

Even as I attempt to fill my mind with matters likely trivial and serving more as somewhat intelligently framed distractions, still I find myself deeply troubled by my inability to simply relax and find any peace in laying still for more than a couple of hours. As a workaholic, I almost always work much harder than smarter. Overall, I have so little to show for my efforts, besides hundreds of thousands of words, most of them wasted in the grand scheme of my total written work. What little I’ve achieved in fiction was just my way of feeling I had expanded my horizons, but in reality is best described as attempting to realize delusions derived from periods of wishful thinking. The truth, inconvenient as it is, seems a much more cogent avenue for my literary pursuits. Even as my eyes try to shut, the parts of my brain that love to fire off obscure vocabulary words to build new sentence structures around refuse to cease their onslaught. 

For I have beheld such beauty, in forms both easily recognizable and others much more understated. My various senses often seem impaired in one way or another and yet I seem to continue to get by. Barely functioning while rediscovering the self that was denied for far too long, these observations seem to become repetitive and somehow incomplete. When I do set myself to describe these sometimes troubling half-baked ideas and nascent realizations, the words simply do not make themselves available to me. This is a greatly disconcerting event that visits me on a fairly regular basis, sometimes daily when I’m in a particularly dry spell for good writing. Sometimes I must find myself engaged in less than perfect writing activities, and I must be okay with this, because at least I’m passing the hours by putting forth honest effort. That I must be content with doing.

~ Amelia Desertsong