An insomniac says what?

I'm writing this at 5am on a Sunday morning, as I've been awake since 4. I've taken the dog for a walk already. Interesting things happen at this hour, besides early morning humidity. I had company - an elderly woman out walking her dog, two young men leaving an apartment down the block, clearly still inebriated from the night before and stumbling back to wherever they came from, people leaving their houses for jobs or maybe church (at this hour, I'm impressed by their commitment). People returning home from overnight jobs. It's still quiet and I find myself actually enjoying the early morning dark.

My usual insomnia pattern - the stress-related one - involves not being able to fall asleep, or falling asleep for a few hours and waking at 2 or 3am to flip channels on the television or pick up a book for a while until I'm sleepy again. Lately, even if I go to bed after midnight, I find myself waking early in the morning - 5 or 6am. It reminds me of my grandmother, who after the age of 70 or so, would wake before sunrise when she stayed with us for summers. My sisters and I would roll out of bed at 8 or 9am to find my grandmother in the kitchen, hair already combed out from rollers, baking rolls for breakfast or making fry bread with orange preserves. She would have already quietly picked up around the house - "puttering," she called it. She'd have already spent an hour or so sitting at the dining room table and playing solitaire with a deck of cards, or watching early morning infomercials on television. I used to call this "old person insomnia." And now, apparently I have it.

After walking the dog, I finished reading "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee" (I think one of the best autobiographies of Harper Lee, even though Lee herself refused to participate). I don't want coffee this early, otherwise I'll find myself cleaning the house by 7am and at the library when it first opens like I did when I woke up before 6am yesterday.

Since I have a few years before middle-age, I know I'm not having "old person insomnia," but this is still something. Something different than the frustration that comes when I lie awake at 3am, different from not being able to fall asleep. I feel productive, wide awake even without coffee, and if Target was open this early I'd probably get in the car and cross one more thing off of my to-do list for the weekend. These early morning hours feel more like gift than curse. But being someone who can easily sleep past 9am unless I set the alarm, I wonder where this is coming from. I'm not 70, I don't have a newborn, I don't even have a houseful of family who will wake up in a few hours expecting fry bread with orange marmalade (not that I have either of those things in the fridge).

The dog has already gone back to sleep. The cat is still sleeping in the same spot from last night. And I'm trying to decide if I will pick up a new book, or try to go back to sleep myself. I feel like I'll miss something important if I do.

It always starts with a sentence...

I haven't seriously worked on fiction in a long time. I've had good excuses - busy with the day job, the writing of the personal nonfiction, writing a nonfiction book - but I've ached to get back to it. The most I've been able to accomplish is taking old stories that never went anywhere and re-working them from time to time.

I went to bed last night around 2am, expecting to have the kind of lazy Sunday morning that I love - getting up briefly to make coffee and grab the Sunday New York Times from the porch while still in my pajamas, back into bed with coffee and paper, watching Sunday Morning on CBS and reading the NYT Magazine during commercials, maybe even dozing off until noon.

Instead, I was wide awake before 7am with sentences running through my head. They weren't mine - they belonged to a character I haven't heard from in a long time. And because I learned a long time ago if I didn't get them down on paper or in a Word document right then and there, they would be lost forever. I won't lie; I did consider rolling back over and going back to sleep. But she wouldn't let me and I had a feeling if I didn't get up and get it down she wouldn't come back, maybe ever.

So I've been writing this morning for hours. I think I've hit around 6,000 words (granted, no editing at all - just the writing and writing). Mixed in with some of the other phrases that were running through my head was something about this character disappearing. I thought it was a veiled threat from this particular muse that she wouldn't return unless I put fingers to keyboard. But later I realized that it was the character - the woman becoming invisible, the one who was afraid of disappearing.

This is the paragraph in the first few that turned the light on for me:

She felt like she was suspended — not just in time, because that had already slowed so gradually she was scarcely aware of the absence of forward movement — but weightless and insignificant. She floated just out of the perception of anyone who may have been paying attention. She disappeared, faded in and out. She was more than invisible. She was vague; she was vapor. Just being empty could have done it, she thinks wryly, no explanation needed. But explanations are needed.

I'm going to finish this one. Maybe today (maybe not because my hands are cramping now and I think I need a nap), maybe later this week. But I will finish it. Because inspiration might be like lightning - random and fleeting and never in the same place twice. And because explanations are needed.

(photo by Mallory Morrison)