When you wake up at four a.m. and cannot for the world go back to sleep, then you might as well use the time wisely and think.

I went to bed at 7:30 last night, exhausted and a bit frustrated since the entire hospital experience seemed to be sticking hard to my ribs. Could not shake it. Not just the circumstances for being there–I could not stop thinking about the people in the beds next to me. A woman had shattered her knee on the pavement due to a slip on the sidewalk ice–she would be admitted for surgery the next day. I listened to her call her husband. She started to cry and I started to feel bad for overhearing it. I could not believe the way she apologized for an accident, for what happened to be out of her control. Same thing for the woman wheeled in after a car accident. She cried too and apologized profusely.

So the curves in the road we cannot forsee. Once thrown from the routine we do nothing but feel guilty for upsetting a trend forming. This is not life! How ridiculous to believe that things will not change, that we can maintain the yesterday for years and years and none will be the wiser. I have no time for the blind eyes surrounding.

That being said, life lately has stolen the pen from my hand and written sentences ahead of me. It is not a lack of spark–it is the enormity of flame. After all life is meant to be lived. My four a.m. had a gas panic about it–all these little minutes spitting into strands. The houses of a dozen neighborhoods, the hands of hundreds of people. I could see Third Street and I could see the pine green of generation carpet, the heels that stomped it into shape. I could see my mother’s walk and the citrus hued billboards of Georgia. I will need five hands all scrawling at once to get this out in time.

Like the doctor asked me, have you experienced any unusual racings of the heart; more stress than usual? Have you been wound up lately? How else to respond but when have I not?

The dose of fragility, sobering. To see it is a waste of time to be apologetic for outcomes we could never predict. We are so driven by what is outside of our control, so unconcerned with what can be touched, shifted, ours. We carry histories, entire worlds within heads and chests–we let our narrators be strangers. It is not enough to just know this. Spotlight instead the action and experience.