The woods are very loud at night. I never think about how many critters are outside until they start chirping after the sun goes down. Crickets, frogs, whatever else. So many. The sound is deafening. Like how the gazillion stars fill up the night sky. There have to be at least that many critters in my yard alone. Granted, it’s an 800-acre backyard.

Multiple acres stretch between my house and the road, and on them roam ten bulls. Landlord’s wife said two weeks ago that there are ten but that one would go to slaughter soon. I counted nine today. I watch them watch me when I drive past them as I come and go. Today they watched me wash dishes through the kitchen window. They are nosy and a little creepy, but I’ve quickly developed an affection for them. Ernest has resting bitch face, or he is sincerely angry all the time. Pablo has goofy rabbit ears. Jim, Ezra, Joan, Fitz, Evan, Jules, and Passos have yet to show much personality, but I’m making an effort to find some.

The farmhouse is old but cute, and it’s comfortable. I feel safe out here, so far from the world. I bring my cat onto the screened-in back porch each night to satisfy her primal, nocturnal instincts. We listen for the coyotes together, their howls slicing through the din of chirps. No coyotes tonight, unfortunately. But kitty is content lying on the porch next to me in the dark, head darting this way and that. This corner of the world isn’t for little kitties. She’s a snack out here. I’m guessing she knows it.

. . . . . .

This is one of those summers that provides little down time for me. We sold the house, moved, and now we are settling in while I am also getting things ready for the new school year. I will have one very complicated job in two locations through two employers, and I start in about a week.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

I was worried that this adventure would be a difficult transition for me. On the contrary, I haven’t been so at peace in a long time.

I never begin writing with a title in mind because rarely do I know what I am going to write about until sentence two. Or in this case, sentence four or five. Here’s another for cadence.

I survived the year and every curveball thrown at me, and I could not have asked for a better ending to this chapter of my life. I am without words, which is unfortunate given this present endeavor. I received many letters and gifts from students, current and former, in the last few weeks of school. My favorite was from a former student, Gavin. Here’s the backstory.

Every year I ask a class or two what color the number eight is. I get a mix of responses: confused looks, random calling out trying to get the right answer, etc. There is not one right answer, but the people who know the answer to the question of what color the number eight is are not aware that their answers are unique in at least two ways. A) They know what color the number eight is, and B) their color is rarely the same as someone else’s. The correct answer is green, in case you are wondering. No, there is not one right answer, but to a synesthete, there is exactly one. And the synesthetes in the room, having never been told that eight is not a color in a normal brain, become confused as to why there are different answers and even more so that most people have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s a fun game I play. Synesthesia is super interesting, and students learn something they might never have learned about brains, even their own, had I not asked. One of the reasons I start the conversation is so that as the year progresses and they start to notice that I often confuse fours and sevens or that blue is sometimes Saturday, they won’t think their physics teacher is a total whack job.

The year before last, Gavin told me that I am forest green because I am happy all the time and also because of the way I walk. That was the best sensory mix-up I’d ever heard, and his group thought it was hilarious. Gavin thought so too, and they laughed about it all year.

At the end of his senior year, which was a couple of weeks ago, Gavin brought me a gift. Two candles: one in a purple frosted jar and the other in a forest green frosted jar. The purple one was called “Joy and Laughter.” He didn’t have to tell me what they meant, he just asked if I remembered.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

Today I submitted my resignation. I pulled all of my folders and files off everything linked to my drive and email and anywhere else I won’t have access to after today, and all of those folders and files are now strewn about my desktop and shoved into other folders. It’s all very messy. The packing of my house started in a similar manner, but now everything is either tossed out, given away, put in storage, or put on display to make the house homey so that a buyer might buy it. Still waiting on that last part, actually, but I’m moving regardless. I signed a teaching contract last Thursday. Today I rewarded myself for getting through the madness of the last year with a hot-fudge brownie sundae. It was the best hot-fudge brownie sundae I’ve ever had.

Someone asked me today what I would do if I didn’t teach. I’d be a musician, I said. Or a writer. I will tell you, Reader, the truth. I’d be a figure skater. What a thrill that would be, dancing on ice with the cold wind blowing over me.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never been as overwhelmed by so many things in my life as I am right now.

My good friends at College Board decided to add a unit to the already packed content. I’ve never taught fluids before, and I don’t remember learning it in school. So I’ve been teaching myself fluid mechanics the last couple of weeks while trying to come up with materials and fun lab or two. I’ve achieved less than half of what I need to, and the new unit starts Monday.

And we’ve started getting the house ready to put on the market. Hired fix-it people and a cleaning crew. Haven’t packed yet. Staging this weekend because the house gets the lockbox Monday, when fluids starts.

I spend my days studying and my evenings scrambling to get the house done. I teach, too. But that’s been easy lately. The kids make it all better.

I am virtually taking a running leap off a cliff. Where will I be in two months? No clue. What will I be doing? Good question.

So I pretend I’m a figure skater gliding gracefully through the air, and sometimes I sneak down to the practice hall after work—a hidden corridor connected to tiny rooms, each with a piano to choose from. No one knows to look for me there. A little surreal, it is. Cathartic. Like ice skating on piano keys with no one around to steal my joy.

I’m the little engine that could. Come Monday, I will be the engine that did. Come May, I will be a fucking rockstar. Or dead.

I’m leaning toward rockstar. But even rockstars need sleep. My alarm goes off in 4.5 hours. It’s like I don’t stop, can’t stop. Sleep? It’s getting in my way.

I’m going to be a grandmother again in a few weeks, too. Lol. I’m like, 90 years old, careening toward homelessness and unemployment in a new town. I’m a juggernaut unraveling my life at light speed.

I’ll be better Monday. Or worse. If I disappear altogether, check the practice hall.

It’s 11:30 pm, but it feels like time is on vacation somewhere. It can stay gone as long as it likes as far as I’m concerned.

Today I checked off another book from the 100-books-to-read-before-I-die list. The Picture of Dorian Gray. I think this one is worthy of the list. I liked going through and marking off the books I’ve already read. I also marked off a few I’m not interested in. And if you include the six I have been in the process of reading for some time now (three of which are on no one’s list), that leaves 52 more to go. But I have time. You know, since I don’t plan to die anytime soon.

I also relearned how to solve the Rubik’s cube today. I’m up to 4 minutes (give or take) from the 1-minute-58-second personal best back in the day. I’m happy with 4 minutes. The world record is about 3 seconds, and I saw a video not too long ago of a guy who solved three cubes simultaneously as he juggled them. Whatever.

I’ve been battling the flu all week, so this surge of energy to solve cubes and read books and clean closets (one closet) feels good. I feel normal again. And look there, I posted something. I’m doing all kinds of crazy things today.

I have 18 self-created playlists on Spotify and many other playlists that I follow, but I find myself listening to my liked songs most of the time because I forget all the other playlists are there. I am quite tired of listening to the current liked songs, however (mostly). I’m writing this post to the playlist I titled “write” because I am writing, though I’ve used it for inspiration only once or twice.

My classroom is connected to the adjacent classroom via a storage room, the doors to which are generally open for no particular reason. The teacher in the room across the storage room plays an endless loop of yacht rock, which by now I find myself replaying in my head much of the time. I have heard an increase in the hallways of the singing of Foreigner over the years. That teacher is making an important impact on the current school culture beyond academics. People need variety.

I have a “class time” playlist that I have played in the past that keeps the students happy and working. It’s chock full of Disney and Abba and other catchy tunes, though I slip in a few cheesy 70s songs. Watching students sing Tom Jones to themselves while they work is entertaining in an evil sort of way. I gain bonus points when I play David Bowie and the like, as though I someone my age listening to something so retro and hip is unusual.

I’m currently sitting in a chair in the living room in the exact middle of Labor Day weekend. Again, the house to myself. It’s raining, peaceful, and I cannot find an ounce of inspiration to do the work I stayed home this weekend to do. I have no choice but to do it, which is why I could not go with the rest of the crew to Galveston. My backpack is staring at me, and I’m getting texts of pictures of people on a boat on the ocean holding large salt-water fishes. The guilt is getting to me, as is the sadness of missing out—the kids are calling it FOMO these days—and the procrastination is fading.

My husband sent me a picture of himself with my daughter peering over his shoulder. I sent back a nearly identical picture of him and me that was taken in the same vicinity three years ago. My way of being there, I guess.

Enough. I didn’t miss out on the fun for nothing. And this damn writing playlist is depressing as hell.

Friday after work I went to the liquor store, and three hours later I was toast. Today was even better. I had a productive morning after a fabulous night’s sleep (thanks to rum), took an unruly dog for a walk in the warm sun, and watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High because no one was home to complain about the movie choice. I then got in my car, drove out of the neighborhood with no destination in mind, and called a far-away friend whose birthday I missed yesterday. Turned out she was thirty minutes away visiting her parents, so my aimless drive turned into a fun day at the park and a cheeseburger with my friend. Something I said reminded her of a song by Kiss, which she played for me in the car. I have never been a fan of Kiss and have no intention of making an effort to find value in their music. All I heard when she played the song was a middle-school guitarist in a garage with his friend playing tap-ka-tap on the drums. I felt an immediate need to replace the noise with Neil Peart, which I did, promptly. And the rest of the day was spent talking about random thoughts that all ended with discussions about music. She knows infinitely more than I do about musical artists, and she taught me some interesting tidbits. David Byrne, for instance, had a girlfriend who frequently joked about weirdos being psycho killers, and she was later killed by one. I have to look that factoid up, because I don’t really believe it. She also added Geddy Lee’s self-narrated autobiography to my Spotify playlist to further my knowledge. We listened to Pigs by Pink Floyd, which reminded me of the time I got a record player for mother’s day. A few albums came with the gift: The Dark Side of the Moon from my husband and Joe Cocker from my oldest daughter because I used to sing to her “You Are So Beautiful” when she was a kid. I cried when I saw the album, and then she cried. And no one knew why. My youngest got me Kenny Rogers because she thought that would be funny. I think Kenny Rogers is pretty great, so the joke was on her. I told my friend the story of the mother’s day gift, which led to a short discussion about country music—short because neither of us are avid fans of the genre aside from the bluesy stuff (and Kenny). We agreed that Chris Stapleton’s version of The National Anthem is the greatest of all the versions. We agreed on a lot of things, in fact, which is probably why we have been friends for most of our lives.

I am too tired to continue writing or to end this post with any level of wit, so I’ll let Rush take over the rest.

Night.

The thing I have always wanted to do seems so far from my capability now and even farther from ever becoming a reality. I wrote a thing, a little thing, an introduction to a book that will never be written. I wrote it in five minutes (give or take) for the purpose of having a snippet to display my talent to potential employers—publishers that need people to churn out 20,000 words to sell. The gig seems like a great opportunity. The idea of ghostwriting is pretty cool. But the commitment…

I take pride in my job. Teaching is a calling that brings meaning to my life beyond being a mom and wife. I worked in the corporate world for a while, and the time and energy it stole from me, from my ability to give everything of myself to my family, made me angry. What good was I to this life if nearly all of my waking hours went to writing textbooks that nobody would ever use? What good was I to my kids if they were left to be raised by a daycare? I swore when I moved away from that place that if I had to work then I would make that time stolen from me be for something noble. So when teaching fell into my lap, I gave in to my fate. At least I would be on my children’s schedules, I thought. And I was. And life was mostly okay.

I exist for other people. That’s my calling. My job. My life. But I want to do other things. I want to write. All of that effort I would put in, though, would feel as though I am throwing away precious time. I’d be a ghostwriter of cheap novels. It sounds fun, but the time required…where would I steal it from? What sacrifice would I have to make to do something I want to do? I can answer that, but I don’t want to hear myself say that I’d be robbing my servitude.

I read a few things to my dad tonight that I have written over the years. I warned him they were bad, but I wanted to share them in the hopes that I would in some small way get an encouraging nudge. A sign, even. I now know that I should stick to cheap novels for cash if anything. That is me feeling sorry for myself.

I have bigger fish to fry. I will save my sadness for when I have time to lament any failed attempts at real writing.

Living without the comforts that electricity affords has its benefits. The only good that came of having no air conditioning was that I didn’t have to go outside to experience summer. What I mean is that when I spend all my time in the cool indoors during summer vacation, which lately I have tended to do, I forget that the season I love the most is passing me by. Summer is my favorite season and not because I get a bit of a vacation. I love the heat, the blue sky, the dark greens, and the vivid crepe myrtle blooms. I love walking in sunshine and feeling a thousand miles away from everything in this world. But lately I’ve stayed indoors. Lately, I’ve been watching tv. That’s not a terrible thing in small doses, but I have let the indoors replace my outdoor, summer sanctuary. Last week, though, a hurricane swept through and took away my air conditioning and tv. I stayed indoors still, but I spent my time reading. The heat was unrelenting, and I felt consumed by summer. Hidden by it. I was forced to go without contact with the outside world, and I hadn’t felt so at ease since I don’t remember when.

The air is back on, and now I have important work-related things to do. But I can still go for a walk if I want to. I should. I will.

I am also now knee-deep in Game of Thrones. I will make time for that, too. But I am aching to write.

Oh, how I yearn for last week when I had so few choices.

I could start by telling how little sleep I’ve been getting and how high my anxiety has been, but that would be old news. More interesting is the hurricane that’s about to hit —literally, though the metaphor fits.

Beryl is the perfect name for a hurricane, don’t you think?

Beryl barreled through my neighborhood and took with it my air conditioning and refrigeration.

We will find out in 24 to 48 hours whether that statement is true.

. . .

I’m moving to East Texas. My husband got a new job there…a three-day turn-around from idea to reality. He starts tomorrow and will be all the way over there while I’m all the way over here finishing the new school year and getting the house ready to sell. This all came about shortly after breaking my toe. The change is a good one, though sudden. So sudden, in fact, that I’m kinda freaking out about it. I’ve been at a cabin for the last four days, and every night I have lain awake staring at the ceiling, mind racing, heart pounding.

Among the unknowns, such as where I’m going to live, is what I’m going to do for income once I move. Getting a teaching job is easy enough. Getting one I’d like is not. I consider these last couple of years to be the pinnacle of my career. I am grateful for being able to work where I do, and though I don’t want to give the job up, I hold onto the comfort that I got to do what I never thought I would have the opportunity to. I have learned more at this school about the content and how to teach in general than I have anywhere else. It’s amazing what I can do when nobody tells me what to do and how to do it. My students have been the cream of the crop, and I’ve pushed them to the breaking point, which has required me to do the same to myself. I am 100% a better person after only two years of an 18-year teaching career. I can take that with me anywhere I go, and maybe that will be enough to make me happy in my next job. But I’m thinking I might take a new route. Maybe. After all, I reached the top. Time for a new mountain to climb, I think. Maybe.

…

About a year ago I learned about a company that connects writers and editors to people who need them. The job doesn’t pay much, but I’ve been told that there are many companies out there just like it, and if I use all of them and get my name thrown around then I can make a decent living. I imagine it takes awhile to get noticed, but maybe I have time. If nothing else, being a ghostwriter will give me experience. I’ll learn a few things. Maybe publish something of my own one day. Who knows. The world seems like an empty canvas these days, and I never thought I’d feel that way again. On the one hand, an empty canvas is exciting. On the other, I’m not sleeping.

And my scores come out tomorrow. At the very worst, they will be lower than last year’s. No. The worst would be having lower scores AND being surpassed by another school. I know these scores are not about me. But, well, they are.

On the upside, my broken toe isn’t as broken as it was three weeks ago. And like a freak, I’m excited about the hurricane. I will miss those.

Dog and I watched the sideways rain blast by until it was time to sit in the dark on the cold tile floor of the downstairs half-bath and wait for the roof to fly off. It didn’t.

And the door jam broke my toe, which is now taped to the one next to it.

But tonight, in a moment of inspiration I poured peach schnapps into a glass of strawberry lemonade. Nectar of the gods — that’s what I’m calling it. Its actual name is diabetes.

Summer, week one, composed by Chopin.

<insert melodramatic wrist to forehead>

Prelude in e minor, op. 28, no. 4

Did I do enough? Did I make things worse? Are they ready?

I thought they were, but today they were second guessing themselves. They are exhausted. They have been taking AP tests for two solid weeks, and the very last one, the one this Friday afternoon, is physics. The. Very. Last. One. And today, they didn’t know how to make a graph. They need sleep. I need sleep. God, let them shake this off.

Did you know that last year my students out-scored the entire district? The state? The nation? The effin’ world? They did. And this year, these kids can out-do last year. But today they were so tired that they couldn’t make a graph.

You know that thing I said once, the piece of wisdom that isn’t really wisdom but a harsh reality?

Today’s accomplishments are tomorrow’s expectations.

It is now tomorrow.

One of the things I dislike about my condition (and there are many things to dislike about my condition) is the certainty of judgment cast by those in the know, as innocent of intention they may be. Call it stigma, call it preconceptions or even experience that causes disenchantment. The mystery that could cast a spell is tainted with doubt of senility. But it’s all quite silly. Everyone has some level of genius and madness. For that, no one is free from judgement.

.

The last couple of days have teased my mind with a thought that came together this evening as I lay here staving off anxiety.

.

Many things have come to a head recently with many people in my life. Their situations are beyond my scope of understanding outside of the empathy I feel. Three people have admitted to thoughts of suicide. And I keep just enough distance to be present while guarding myself from spiraling with them. I am standoffish at times because I have to be. Because in the midst of their troubles my own surface, though some faintly. I thought to myself tonight that I have a lot to work on. But then that thing that has been tapping on the door to my mind entered and made itself clear as day. I don’t have to work on anything because I gave it up to God a long time ago. What I mean is that I spoke the words, only I didn’t really do it. I don’t have to work on anything while I keep my eyes on him. I understand that now, and I’m practicing. Sounds like avoidance to me. Sounds like a lot of things I learned while getting that counseling degree I never used. Sounds like a lot of things it isn’t.

Regarding my mental state, I’m in good company. Many people I admire are or were as afflicted as I am. Madness has its benefits.

I cannot in anyway put in a good light the physiological effects that my current situations have caused, however. Anxiety, for one. I’m tense and restless. My heart races. I can pinpoint several catalysts, all of which will pass. I’m grateful they are temporary.

I sure could use a Vicodin, though.

Teachers all over America are running on fumes. Aside from being tired all the time, I’m not clawing my way to the finish as usual. I’m actually quite sad. I can remember one other year I felt this level of sadness. That was the year my most difficult students graduated. They were the ones I had four years straight, the ones that made me get a masters degree to get out of teaching, and for them my tears started flowing in February of that last year. I never did get out of teaching. All the anguish they caused me was met with an unexpected feeling of loss when they left. This year has been by far the easiest of my career. I enjoyed this year more than the rest. I saw brains blossom in the last few weeks in a way I didn’t expect, and I recently witnessed the kids’ realizations that they understand what most people don’t and never will know. Today I watched them engage in random conversations as close friends, and I knew these friendships would last. I knew they made them in AP Physics. And my heart broke. In less than two weeks, they will be gone. One of the things they don’t tell people who are just starting their teaching careers is that at the end of every year you have to let go. You have to send your children off into the world. Over and over. Most years I am a little sad, but I welcome the summer breaks. This year is different. Letting go is extra hard.

Maybe it would’ve been easier if we hadn’t made the music videos. I’m compiling them for us to watch the last day. And I am adding a video of me playing a ukelele (badly) and singing them a song I wrote. It’s a funny video, and they aren’t expecting it. My original hope was to entertain them. My hope now is to hold it together.

So tomorrow I will mingle with them. Laugh. Gather memories to hold onto while I still can. Pretend my heart isn’t breaking.

This evening I got a call from a friend. Her son was admitted to the hospital, and she was waiting for word on his condition. As I waited with her over the phone, our conversation took many turns from serious to light to reminiscent. I have known her since she approached me in the library in college 30 years ago, and she told me something about herself that in all this time I never knew. We found reasons to laugh about it, which is something we both needed, and somehow we ended on whether people roll joints anymore and how all these edibles and Jules have removed one of the best parts of getting high. I don’t miss the high, but I do miss the shared experience. The glow of the lighter through the smoke. The scent. The friends. The calm. The music.

Her son is going to be okay.

Today I had exactly two conversations, and during both of them I learned amazing things about amazing people.

As I watched tv tonight, I thought about all the time I have wasted staring at that box on the wall, but then I remembered the juicy parts of the day and I felt okay.

I read once that offering your time is the greatest honor you can bestow.

Some of the best moments I have shared were spent in silence. Watching rain wash over a lake with someone I never got along with is one of them. Sitting in lawn chairs in a pasture in the middle of the night watching the stars with my brother is another. Listening to Joe Cocker on vinyl while eating habanero salsa and chips at the kitchen table with my father-in-law is a random memory but a cherished one. Likely best of all was lying in the grass holding kite strings with my three-year-old. She and I turned to look at each other while we held our kite as it soared way up high. I could relive that moment of silence for the rest of my life.

There are many others. I collect them.

For a while now, I have felt sad that my adventures are running out of time to find me and that life has fewer surprises ahead. But I have many more bottles to fill with precious, silent moments, and I have a good 40 or 50 years of shelf space left to store them.

I had a conversation this morning with an incredible woman who I didn’t know was so incredible despite having known her a year and a half. That’s what happens when you don’t talk to people–you never learn how truly amazing they are. I am blown away, and I am inspired by the number of extraordinary life stories this 70-year-old woman has to tell. I pleaded with her to write them down, to write a book, and I passed off that request as an encouragement to record her life story for posterity when in fact my intentions were entirely selfish. I want to read this book. I want to have lived a life as exciting as hers. And maybe I have. Margaret Atwood would be disappointed in me if I didn’t tell my story. But she doesn’t know me, and she would never read me. She simply planted a seed that she intended for anyone who would listen. I did.

To satisfy Margaret’s request and another of an old friend, here is a bit of my story.

. . . . . .

I was maybe five years old at the time, too young to be distracted by worries and too old to not notice the important things. I stood atop a hillside of tall yellow grass spotted with gray, jagged rocks and mammoth boulders. The rolling yellow hills extended in all directions until they met blue sky. Baboons perched on the boulders nearby, looking out over their home with the same wonder. I felt an intense sense of freedom. Standing in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of everywhere, looking out over the vast African landscape made an intense, profound, and everlasting impact. Freedom was a discovery I made through a combination of experiences there, witnessing a dichotomy of human bondage and the vast expanse of the savanna. But magic, the magic of the imagination, is the second most important thing I learned and carry with me still.

My mom kept my bookshelf well stocked from before I could read until our house burned down when I was in junior high. Middle-child syndrome is real, but very young, invisible me was given the gift of books to bide my time alone. One particularly lonely afternoon, I discovered a paperback on my bookshelf that had a picture of a dark, wild jungle, with images of boas hanging from twisted tree limbs and assorted glowing eyes peering out of the blackness. The illustrator had stolen the image right from my memory. My family lived in South Africa and travelled through the southern countries. Our travels led us through a mysterious jungle, the looks of which were amazingly torn right from the cover of that book, Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, of whom I became an instant fan. I wrote a research paper in high school over Kipling and discovered his imagination was like mine. The line between imagination and reality didn’t exist for him as a young boy in the jungles of India. As an adult, he recounted his magical experiences as though he were a child, as though they were real, as I have always done with my African experiences. But in a dark jungle, who’s to say what is or isn’t real?

. . . . . .

Eleanor lived a magical life in her mind and some might say an exciting one in reality. Perhaps she will peek outside from behind the heavy curtains in her living room and let some light in. Maybe even set aside the ruse a bit and put a little of herself into the world. Just kidding. Her ruse is often sabotaged by her inability to keep her own light in. She cannot help being her authentic self, as much as she tries to fool the world. Silly girl.

I had a dream once that I fell asleep on the edge of a plateau that looked out over a canyon. The ground I lay on and all around me was deep red orange, and the sun shone through a deep blue sky. I was warm as I basked in the bright sun overhead, and asleep next to me was another person who in the dream I knew but in reality didn’t. I felt intensely at peace. At times I experience this same surreal feeling while awake. I am certain that most of the world isn’t familiar with that lucid dream state outside of sleep. I count myself lucky. I could possibly blame it on my illness, but I have had these experiences my entire life, long before the illness showed up. I have always felt apart from other people. Awkward, even. Others can’t possibly exist in this world I live in, could they? I dare not ask them.

Bipolar disorder is a gift sometimes. Depression is what I struggle with mostly, but sometimes an overwhelming feeling of passion overcomes me. If I’m lucky, the result is something written or drawn worth of holding onto. Today I drove down the road with my chest ablaze. I turned the music up loud to block out the noise, and I held onto my shirt to keep my heart from bursting through.

When this disorder was new to me, my fear of the impending despair that would soon follow the flames would snuff them out. I eventually learned to hold onto the passion as long as it allowed itself to manifest, and I learned to make the most of the good moments and especially the great ones. I’ve been told that I inspire passion in other people in a variety of ways, but its not me doing the inspiring. I am at the mercy of this illness that only a handful of people know I fight.

Writing helps, but when the words don’t come, my fingers itch for a different kind of keys. My insides resonate with piano chords in a way that writing can’t. I don’t hear the music, I become it. I’ve mentioned this to other musicians, and they say they feel the same. I don’t have a piano anymore, and I fear this flame will burn clean through me without one. Today, I am settling for the keys connected to this screen, but the screen remains lifeless. I envy writers who have a greater gift for wordcraft. What power they have over people like me and, if they are anything like me, over themselves. I haven’t felt that power in a long time, but I hear it knocking. Knocking, knocking, this incessant phantom knocks. Tapping at my chamber door, it is.

. . . . . .

Back in 2006-ish, I wrote the beginning of a book. A chapter. I can never seem to write more than a chapter of anything I write. Not true, but the words are crap after one chapter, so I generally refrain from writing beyond an introduction. I can write a hell of an intro and a pretty good ending, but all the stuff in between lacks the same passion as the punch I put into each end of the middle.

So back in 2006-ish, I started writing. I had a playlist that I listened to obsessively as I spent weeks refining this one thing. The songs were stored on an iPod that has since disappeared, just as that one chapter and any further desire to write did. A few years later, I watched a snippet of Blood Diamond, enough to make me turn the movie off, and I plunged back into writing. The movie scene woke up a deeply-rooted part of me that I had forgotten or maybe didn’t know was there. I hadn’t realized how deeply Africa affected me. Little girl me absorbed, potently, people and places in that land, and they’ve lived in me ever since.

Everything I’ve written comes from that part of me. That’s where the words are buried.

I had a surge of well-being overtake me on Friday. That was God. He does that, you know.

My oldest daughter’s family moved into a new home this weekend, and my husband and I went to Dallas to help out. Going from a small house to a large one makes for easy unpacking, but nothing is easy when you have a baby. My family moved 13 times while we raised our kids. I made that number up, but it’s not a far from the truth. Seems we were always living out of boxes. Not until we moved into the house we are in now did I even unpack all the boxes that I sealed in 2005. The time capsules travelled with us. A clock inside them had stopped like a timeline with a dead end. The last 20 years have been an offshoot of the life we left behind in Austin, and we’ve left crumbs all over San Antonio and Houston and even Dallas a little since the departure. Austin isn’t where we started, but it’s where our kids did, sort of. So Austin kinda feels like home. But not really. Dallas is where I’m from and is the place I always carry with me. Now my daughter is there, so a part of me has returned home. She’s a Dallas-ite by default, and it suits her. My brother deserted Dallas for Fort Worth eons ago, and that place suits him. A bit of Austin, that place is. Stuck between two worlds, that place is, like my brother. My kids aren’t really from anywhere because they are from everywhere, but DNA has a sneaky way of pointing us to our roots.

I’ll never live in Dallas. You can never go home again, a guy said once. The house I grew up in belongs to strangers now.

We’ve been in this house for nearly seven years. I unpacked all my boxes not that long ago, finally, to find a treasure of little girl things and forgotten memories. But I still haven’t put up pictures. I haven’t reached a sense of permanence just yet.

It feels good to be back in my own bed tonight with my own pillows and my cat at the foot of my bed stalking my feet. The cat that travelled with us since Austin is a few feet underground outside my window, so I guess this home is more permanent than I’ve really thought it to be. A part of us will remain in the soil when we leave. And we will leave. It’s weird to think we won’t. A yurt wouldn’t be out of the question for us. But this isn’t Mongolia.

I wake up several times a night and generally go back to sleep within minutes. There is a bit of anxiety that I won’t, but I’ve been lucky. Not tonight, I’m afraid. I saw 2:58 when I tapped my watch. It’s now 3:39. Alarm goes off at 5. Morning comes early.

I haven’t been functioning well the last few weeks, and it’s been getting harder to keep my head above water. A lot is happening, which I feel like I could push through. But I fight my way through each day.

A sticky note appeared on my side mirror on my car one afternoon. The handwriting was that of a little girl telling me that if God is for me then who can be against me. Romans. The note is on my dash now. I saw a video about telling my brain that I am doing great because the brain believes what it’s told, even lies, and the body physically responds accordingly.

I’m sleepy. I will sleep the next hour and a half (resetting my alarm), and I will feel like I had a full night’s sleep. I feel fine.

The great thing about having a blog is being able to say whatever, however, and if someone reads it, great, and if not, great, but the words are in the world, not just your head, and on the page where you put them so you can look at them from a distance. Externalize them to gain some perspective. Maybe get a little perspective from a passerby. Passersby.

It feels good to write on the screen again. I have a few word documents of unfinished stories and such, but I don’t visit them much. I have notes in my phone that I jot down when the inspiration hits. Last weekend I sat in the sunny chair while my daughter studied at the desk next to me, and I read through old journals that have collected in a basket there. Most of the entries aren’t dated, and the journals are mostly blank. They all start with a bang and then fade to doodles and to-do lists. Then a new shiny one shows up. Then another. My daughter made fun of my many mostly-empty journals, and I reminded her that someday she and her sister will fight over them. I then found a page among many empty ones that had something silly written in handwriting that is not mine. She smiled. I flipped through a “600 Things to Draw” book and saw a giraffe on the giraffe page that I didn’t draw. She smiled again. The journals are like fly traps. Leave one out and words and doodles will get stuck to a page by unsuspecting passersby (there’s that word again) who find themselves overcome by a sudden urge to write. Silly little girls are particularly susceptible. Had I realized this sooner, I would have spread cute sparkly traps out all over.

I found my one-thing journal while going through the basket. I don’t remember where I got the idea. Maybe I read about it, or maybe I came up with it (I doubt it). The idea is to write one thing down that you learned that day. Anything. After a lot of days you can see you learned a lot of things. Keep one for a year or more and you’ll see the crazy amount of things that you learned and forgot. I relearned last weekend while flipping through my one-thing journal that worms don’t crawl into apples, they crawl out. Eggs are laid in the blossoms, and the apples grow around the eggs. Then the eggs hatch and the worms eat their way out. Nice.

Today I learned that Jon Favreau is a hotshot director who acts in his own movies. I thought he was an actor who always got stuck playing the best friend. Who knew.

Guess what? Tomorrow is Saturday, and I get to sleep in.

And now it’s bedtime the night after. I could go to bed, but I’m in that weird, loopy state when the words show up.

I’ve been learning things and getting better at fooling people into thinking I know more stuff than I do. Maybe if my brain wasn’t so clouded by exhaustion I could put some truth behind the pretending. I think people would rather the people around them to know things. There is comfort in someone else having the burden of knowledge. There is envy in it, too. I’m not looking for either, I just don’t like to not know things. And I kinda like the facade. Until the pressure to prove myself arises, anyway. In any case, I’m trusted to do as I please. That alone makes the lie worth the fear of exposure.

I do a better job when left to my own devices. Maybe the powers that be have figured that out.

Boy, I’m tired.

The conundrum now is do I eat or do I go to bed? Bed, I think. I’m too tired to chew. But I’m also too tired to get up. If my fingers weren’t comfortably tapping these keys I’d be locked in a state of torpor. I’m sleep-writing. I’m Homer Simpson driving his bed-car off the road into a purpley night-night sky.

Eyes now closing. Delta waves are flooding my brain. I like those.

I wandered around the empty house today, bored, restless, anxious, and looking for something to entertain me. I sat in the sunny chair and glanced over the bookshelf. Touched the books. Picked one up, flipped through it, put it back. Gazed at the craft supplies. Walked back downstairs and wandered through the kitchen. Nothing there. A cat stared at me. I ignored her. An interesting change, I thought. I picked up my laptop and flopped onto the couch. Opened up Eleanor and wrote in a new character, Arnold Crumbly. He’s missing and probably dead. She doesn’t know what happened to him. Neither do I.

As I lay on the couch staring at the ceiling, still in my pajamas, I thought how pitiful I am to want to do all these things but have no desire to make the effort. So I got dressed and drove to Jersey Mike’s. I listened to classic rock on the way there and wondered whether rock music is still being produced. I know what the kids are listening to these days because I’m around them most of the time, and it’s not rock. I have a “class time” playlist to expose them to the good stuff, but they already know a lot of it. It’s fun to watch them sing along while they work. Sometimes they feel the beat and show it.

Right now I’m sitting in a parking lot typing this because I like writing in warm parking lots. Robert Plant is singing, and the sun just dipped behind the treetops. Flecks on sunlight dot the concrete end the cars and the dash. A security guard dressed in black and red is sitting on a horse in the shade like a Mountie, and I wonder what he is thinking about as he watches cars. Watches people. Making up stories about their lives, maybe. I feel ya, man. I feel ya.

Why is it that I can’t sleep when school starts back up? Anxiety, maybe. Constantly thinking about what I can do better this time around and all the things I need to do immediately to avoid getting behind, maybe. Yes, and yes, and yes. My mind spirals down a rabbit hole of past failures as I tire of these contemplations.

Knowing my alarm goes off in two hours and that lack of sleep makes my brain less usable isn’t helpful..

Neither is this lit screen I’m looking at as I type and erase and retype with clumsy thumbs.

…

The book I recently finished left me unnerved. I started the book over a year ago. No, two years ago. I put it down for a year after reading halfway through because as the story progressed I became less interested. But not finishing ate at me over time. I read another quarter of the book last year and then put it down again. I recently picked it up again because I got bored with Game of Thrones (how?), and as I approached the end of the book, I became more determined to finish. I couldn’t give up so close to the end. The snowball gained speed as the end drew near, and faster and faster I became more engrossed in how this perpetual, agonizingly plot might redeem itself and whether anything good would come of the protagonist’s suffering. The book ended with the same uncertainty it maintained from the start. Did he trap her into a bondage that would play out the rest of her days out of spite? Did she welcome her destiny?

The captain looked at Férmina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost.

Was it that her grey eyelashes showed the sign of her last days? Was winter coming? Not likely in the Caribbean. Was the shudder she gave when she heard the familiar, desperate love in Florentinoo Ariza’s voice an indication that her heart had suddenly become cold? Was she happy to finally live the life she rejected 54 years ago? Was Florentino’s decision to live the remainder of their days together revenge for her denying him a lifetime of love?

…

One hour and ten minutes is what I have left for sleep. I will try again to close my eyes, but now I have that confounded book in my head.

A desperate and inescapable loneliness has overcome me this morning. Last night I woke up so many times that it’s though I haven’t slept. With everyone gone for fishing tournaments or three-day drunken frolics on the seashore or living new lives with new babies, here I am at home listening to a dishwasher that a young person with the energy of five loaded at 8 AM before getting in a car with her dog to head to Galveston with a whoosh of a goodbye. For once, reading seems like a thief, as I immerse myself in fiction while the real world lives and breathes around me, without me, and now I without it save two cats, the sound of a dripping faucet, and the life of a dishwasher that is remnant of the actions of a person I wish was still here. Not even the veil of sleep can relieve my ache, even if I could bring my mind to give in to it.

One often meets his destiny on the path he takes to avoid it.

Master Oogway, Kung Fu Panda

Let’s leave the rants in the drafts pile.

I’ve been listening to a Spanish radio station and trying to not translate anything in my head. The longer I listen, the easier it is to distinguish one word from the next even when I don’t know what the words mean. I’m discovering that I understand what the radio people are saying better when I don’t try to understand.

I asked a student from Mexico recently to say a sentence in Spanish so that I could see if I knew what he was saying.

“El edificio se calló.”

I knew neither of those words.

Then I remembered edifice from The Fountain Head, and the rest fell into place.

“That’s dark,” I said.

“My brain is going to explode soon,” he said back with his hands grasping his head and his eyes locked on mine. I immediately understood the edifice metaphor.

“You’re going to do great, Rodrigo. The mortar this class used to build your brain is stronger than whatever they used to hold these bricks up.”

It’s AP Physics, and the students are taking their big test soon. And the mad instructor grins with sadistic joy and pride, knowing that they are going to blow the fucking test out of the water.

This is my favorite part of the school year.