One minute to midnight here, and I am neither asleep nor awake

Just feeling sort of aimlessly creative at the moment. Really, I want to reach over the side of my bed to get my writing folder out of my bag. But I feel fairly certain that anything as concrete as a piece of blank paper and a pen will shrivel this urge. I can't even bring myself to open Word.

Here, things feel sort of temporary. Well, not quite that, but there's no pressure here to fit into any particular format. It doesn't matter if something is fact, fiction, letter, diary....in fact, most of the time I'm writing this with just my own self and the Beautiful Girl in mind as possible readers.

I just want to write, or to express something. I keep feeling snippets of something forming in the back of my mind. I can't catch onto anything, but there's something there. I'm sort of sad when I think about the fact that it's been years since I last woke up in the night and HAD to write something down. I used to sleep with a pen and paper in my bed just for that reason. These days, if I wake up in the night, I'm usually worrying about work, or remembering some errand that needs doing.

I'm more sensible that I think I'd like to be right now. Really, I'm in a mood to stay up all night, but I won't. I have a long day tomorrow. I need to be up early and have my brain in gear. But, oh how I long for that 4am feeling! It's both wonderful and terrible. It's bleak and lonely, but empowering. I alone would be awake then (or so it would feel), and my mind would be stretched thin: tight like a hair about to snap between fingertips. There is a feeling then of being right at the edge of something. Of pressing up against another way of existing and understanding.

When I was travelling just last year, I stayed up late sometimes reading and writing. It was wonderful. There's no real reason why I couldn't still do it. But I am feeling old, and hating the idea of being tired all tomorrow. Of coming back from work and crashing instead of doing something productive. Is this sensible or sad? My eyes are feeling heavy now, even though my brain is wiry and darting between ideas 'like a puppy loosed from its leash'.

You went into the kitchen cupboard, got yourself another hour, and you gave half of it to me

That's exactly what I'm listening to right now. My mouth is still sticky with peanut butter, and the crumbs of rice cakes are spread through my bed. My hands are cold right up to the wrist, and I can feel a draft seeping in to the room and over my shoulder. I wish there was heating here...anywhere here in this whole town. The air smells of woodsmoke from the pot of lapsang on my bedside table, and I can almost believe that there's a fire in another room nearby.

I opened up this page about an hour ago, feeling that I'd write something big. Some sort of overview or evaluation of the state of things. But I've just wasted today by pottering online, and everything feels so very small now. And anyway, the big things in my life are just a bit too big to look at without the bottom of my stomach falling away in fear at the immensity of it all.

Mostly though, I'm just feeling ok. I've spent some time on various blog posts about body image related things, and I realise that I probably feel better about myself than I've ever managed to in the past. That's nice....not in an earth-shattering way. It's just crept upon me as a nice thing that exists in my mind.

I also think I feel more secure about most things. My friends at work are 22 and 23, and every time I talk with them, I know for sure that I'd rather be 29 than go back to all of that uncertainty, and that sense of barely being able to grasp at a sense of your own wants and needs.

I'm reading the Beautiful Girl's blog, and wishing there was more. Wishing I could spend a day burried inside her thoughts and ideas. But that understatement is so her that I still feel strongly connected even by those few scraps of sentences.

One admission: this week, I have become afraid of writing again. I am back in the place where I prefer to dream of my untapped potential than sit for hours on end and look at the rubbish that comes out of my pen. I am using any excuse to avoid putting that pen to paper.