A sleepless night revisited

Recently, during the middle of the night when my mind was hell-bent on keeping me awake…again…I was listening out the bedroom window to the silence of the city…absolute, total, deafening silence. It was wonderful.

What struck me was how quiet the city can actually be except for the occasional cricket that must have had a case of ‘sympathy insomnia.’

By the time the train rolled through town at 4:33 a.m., my mind started thinking of something to write for our writers group that would be meeting soon.  It started like this …

                 “The name and number on the caller ID was such a surprise…a good surprise…the kind that takes your breath away and makes your heart skip a beat.  It took her back to when she was 15 years old and had found her first love…that one love that nobody forgets.  It was his name.  It was apparently his number.  But there was no message.

                Whew, she thought, just glad she wasn’t here to pick up the phone.  Her anxiety started kicking in and she wondered how she would handle this without acting like a giddy teenager?  Maybe he won’t call back, and she won’t have to worry about it.  But, truth be told, she would so love to hear his soft raspy voice again.

                A day or so later there was the second missed call.  Why’s he calling after all this time?

                She started thinking again about the loneliness she sometimes felt now…not loneliness as in having nobody in her life because she has a huge loving family, many wonderful friends and a schedule that she can’t keep up with.  

                It’s more like that loneliness she felt during her decades-long marriage.  The kind of loneliness that can be so easily cured by watching a beautiful sunset or walking under a full moon with someone special, the simple act of holding hands, thinking a thought just seconds before he says the same thing out loud, talking for hours and not realizing how the time flew by, being comfortable together for hours without even having to talk…all this with someone you love dearly and, more important, who recognizes that being friends is the starting place for finding love.

                There goes the phone again…”

I have no idea where it would go from this point.  As I played around in my head with what could be the beginning of a great piece of fiction, the thought came to me that ‘I don’t have time for this.’

I need to work on that new pen and ink drawing I just started.  And then there’s that bracelet I promised to make for No5, the genealogy research I’m way behind on, updates for my family history blog, the unfinished aprons for No5 and No8, planned sleepovers for several of the grandkids, a day trip with my daughter-in-law, Christmas shopping lists to plan, repairs that need to be made to the back porch, the front hallway to paint, the quilt I was going to finish by the end of August and didn’t…

Geez, do I have ADD or what?

By the way, for the young and/or clueless, this is a telephone…

Image courtesy of http://vintagefeedsacks.blogspot.com/