She Screams
I find it in a state of half-waking.
A slumber in a college dorm with the fairy lights left on,
Twinkling like stars in my dreams.
I don’t sleep as well these days.
No, I don’t sleep as well,
Not when caffeine courses through my veins,
When my fingers itch from non stop typing, writing, creating,
When my eyes,
Having stared at a screen for hours on end,
Begin to ache and I yearn for sleep.
I find it then,
When the line blurs between
Life and home and school and work and
Reality and dreams.
My lines blur sometimes.
Dreams worm their way to waking
Like little parasites.
Gnawing away at the boundary between what is and what
Isn’t.
And so I find myself at 3 a.m.,
Bleary eyes open, sitting up and shifting my still-warm covers off
As I try not to fall off the bed.
A small notebook beside me waits
For jumbled thoughts written in colorful ink,
Scrawled in barely-legible script,
Written by an author who uses a return to comfort as motivation
To get them down as quickly as she can.
Sometimes they’re coherent.
Sometimes they blossom into works of art,
Beautiful things with structure and plot and power.
I silence myself sometimes.
I sit in the back of the class and voice my thoughts when they’re asked for,
But never unsolicited.
My subconscious hates me for it.
She screams her thoughts at the front of my mind
While I bite my tongue and
Offer a polite smile.
She clenches her fists.
I keep my hands folded delicately in my lap.
She finds her voice in my dreams,
Bursts of inspiration that come to me in the late hours of the night.
Or the early hours of the morning.
They’re indiscernible.
She yells and creates and escapes her confines,
Forces me awake.
And I write.