Night Time

My night is ticking away, quiet, soft, near-silent. Night is my time. The day is filled with work, chores, people, obligations. Night is the time when I can take a book to bed--or not. I can watch tv 'til dawn--or not. I can go to sleep--or not. 

Night has always been storytime. I'd lie awake, making up improbable and silly stories about people who lived in caves and had melodramatic romances. I'd take on their voices in soft whispers, getting lost in a fairy world. In a sense, I still do this. Night is when my characters in my secret stories have their conversations, hash out their personalities, work out their relationships. Not much plotting happens, but that's not the point. It's those conversations. Conversations fascinate me--in movies, in books. I want to hear the characters talk. Perhaps that's why my characters talk a lot. And nighttime is when they do their best talking. 

This time is when I'm the writer free of the pen and the keyboard. Words flow and flow, and nothing slows me down, not the click of the keys or the dragging of nib on paper or the painful writer's cramp I've always gotten, ever since I filled those two composition notebooks with double-spaced ball-point-pen twelve-year-old writing. 

Night time is my time. It is the time when my art is the best, the most focused. I suffer from a lack of focus. I suspect a lifetime of undiagnosed ADHD. It's a bittersweet gift; it's the ability to focus on what I love for hours at a time but the inability to focus on what bores me for even five minutes. It's when colors come together on paper or words flow from my brain in beautiful, liquid turns of phrase and it's easy, so easy, to say what I want to say.

In the morning, I'll realize that the conversation in my head was melodramatic drivel. The colors weren't quite so brilliant as I thought. The turns of phrase are less excellent and more pretentious. But for a shining, moment in the dark, in the night time, I was brilliant. Maybe that's why night time is my time.