Needs editing

Up at 5:30, thoughts racing through my brain with no particular destination, just visiting the same old subjects of what I should do, what have I read recently, how I wish I was still sleeping. The mini-bar fridge drones on, sucking energy from every life force around it. The fan in the bathroom competes for noisy dominance while JM watches podcasts in there so as not to wake me up. Too late. JM abandons me for the hotel cafe with faster wireless speeds. Instead of staying buried under the covers I decide to write, slow the pace down.
We’re back early from our two week safari. Long story short (meaning I’m not yet allowed to write about it), we turned around after the first day and came back to Alice.
My writing needs to be edited, but that’s the story of my life. Needs editing.

Earlier I was thinking about that girl I was so long ago. Who slept on her back, one knee raised and the other leg balanced perfectly across it, arms tossed above her head. She wore a cotton night gown made by her great-aunt Glady, always had a squirrel’s nest for hair when she woke up, and just a few years earlier would stick band-aids on door frames until her mother told her to stop wasting them. What did she want to do when she grew up? What did she like to do? Was she entirely dependent on others for direction? When did she start living only in her head?
My dreams of late have held a glimpse of feeling truly ALIVE again. In the one from yesterday I was at a college full of geologists who were all applying and being accepted for graduate school and they kept hounding me to follow suit. I finally yelled at them from my dorm room, “I don’t care about rocks! I just want to paint!” and slammed the door on them, feeling cruel and yet they were all cheering for me. In that dream was a hint of passion for something that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Not passion for painting, but for slamming doors. Perhaps I should go back into acting where that might be seen as a worthy skill.
This feels good. I should do this every morning, perhaps eventually being happy to be awake at (what was considered before) an ungodly hour. You don’t know how many times I’ve started writing something in my head only to lose it later. Instead I’ll sit at the keyboard and space out, giving up eventually and reading other people’s blogs. There are so many creative, funny, artistic, wonderful people out there. You’re probably one of them. Enough about you though…
Oh crap, my eye is bugging on me again. It seems I wake up every few months and discover that a layer of my eyeball has been peeled off by the lid (not really, but you get the idea). It’s so miserably painful, tearing up, blinking rapidly, but not fully. It eventually fixes itself when I go back to sleep, but I haven’t gone back to sleep now have I? Ouch.
About 13 years ago when going through a what-do-I-want-to-do-with-my-life phase I remembered I wanted to be a nurse when I was little, hence the band-aids. I had drawn several pictures of myself with my pink-striped shirt and a nurses’ hat. I was jealous of the kids with the fake plastic doctor’s bags. Barbie always had a cast on her leg or arm. During this retrospective I realized, wait a minute, I was drawing pictures, making art, I must really be an artist. Nice leap, eh? Don’t all kids make art? If I do just want to paint, well then, why not houses?
I’m going to shower now and see if I don’t feel a bit more human. I’ll debate posting this, maybe delete the part about fairies*, and kick myself the rest of the day for leaving it as is and hitting the publish button.
*I did, it was just crazy talk. 5:00-me is off her rocker.