Nightlights

There are just some times when I don't feel like writing, but it isn't like writer's block. I find these times the worst, because I have stories, I have places I want to take those stories and ideas for new ones, but anytime I open up a word processor with the intent to write(and the laughable exception of opening up my blog page was) I can't write. I'm choking now, all the time, and I can figure out why. Maybe it's because I'm tired, or hungry, maybe it's because I'm stressing about finding a new job and hoping that my phone's battery hangs on just long enough so that I can upgrade it next month, maybe it's because a certain special girl and I have been locking horns lately. I don't know what it is, but I just can't focus. I'm at the point again where I'm not sleeping. Not that I can't sleep, because I can, but I don't want to sleep. It feels like a waste again, and I thought that I was past that.

When I was little, laying in bed fending off sleep was what I did. I would lay awake and think up new things every night, alone in the gloom, because I don't like nightlights. I've never been able to stomach them. Not as a child, not as an adult, and there's some inherent logic in the back of my mind that I would rather live in the dark with the creatures than turn on the lights and let them know I'm there. I've always been like this, afraid to turn on lights, afraid to illuminate myself and face the darkness, because, like anybody that has had access to a computer at any time of the night and has read something even remotely frightening, you get the eerie feeling that something is behind you. Even when you know, logically, there can't be anything behind you, one is afraid to turn around.

I'm assuming that I feel like that. The light represents all of the things I'm afraid of. My backlit body is a shining beacon in the darkness, a single, flashing red blinker on a road without street lamps. The darkness, though I've dwelt there most of my life, sees the change and unleashes its terrors to consume me. I've always felt the light would be my betrayer. It represents a small circle of vulnerability, a little glowing circle of self-awareness in a roving sea of dark. When you've known that darkness, which for me is writing and the inside of my own imagination since I was young enough to form words and ideas, the darkness is your home.

All I've done is push it's boundaries, learned its forests and bodies of water. I can write short responses in character, I can write a few paragraphs in character. I've learned to write pages in character and in other characters. The characters can interact now in a believable way, held together by prose that I've practiced and edited and pulled apart before stitching it back together with the curved needle and coarse string I've seen in survival movies.

The dark has expanded to encompass different things, different worlds, old times, new times, but the light is still there. The light is success and it is failure. It's a thing of beauty and also a horrible, ugly, twisted thing. The light is selling on ebook for three dollars, and it's also somebody not liking what you wrote and returning it. It's also somebody getting a free read and giving it back, making you happy for a few hours and then snatching back what they've paid to read what you wrote without leaving either praise or scathing hatred. I am afraid of the light because both success and failure live there, and once I let it into the sanctuary of worlds that I've kept sheathed in dark, everything but the farthest corners will be illuminated and looked upon for what they are.

I'm just hoping that the lack of light so far hasn't led me to create horrid, misshapen things. I can only hope.