Prompt # 57

5:00

Pre-dawn. Waiting for the light to show up to keep me company. It was a short night. I woke up hearing the jangling of keys and someone coming into the apartment but there was no-one here. I wasn't creeped out for long. N's twitter feed shows up in my phone messages and he had re-tweeted a friend's possum in the house story that made me laugh because the punch-line was a your mama joke and I was the mother in question. Laughter cleared the cobwebs out of my head. 

I have had that key jangling wake up many times. I don't know if it's just a strange dream or an old, bone deep, bad memory spilling over. I don't like the sound of keys. They remind me of my father coming home from work. For a long time I didn't like sunset either. It meant the sound of the keys was coming. Night was coming and all the rest. 

It's only the last ten years that I have learned to sleep at night, at least some of the time. I lived a lifetime without sleep, or with little bursts of sleep, an hour, two hours or three, then I'd be jolted wide awake and ready to fight. Now on good nights I can sleep. Now I have, thanks to E and my little writing community helping me, an actual bed and can lay down at night. This makes sleep so much easier and deeper. I have to wonder if I hit REM sleep much at all the three years I was sitting all night in an upright chair to sleep. 

7:29

Light took me outside. That and potboy, my nemesis neighbor, was creeping in the bushes in the dark, next to our building smoking his noxious mixture of skunk weed and cigar tobacco and blowing it up at the window. Before I left I looked out the window and called him a shit head and he scurried barefoot back into his apartment. We have a long standing, contentious,  relationship. His pot plants are fucking beautiful though. He had a forest of them growing outside my window. 

Decaf coffee from Peets this morning because we are out and I can't seem to make the day go without it. I got in the habit of coffee time again while I was with A. I had to get more wet food for the cat. I was grateful the little rude racist dude wasn't on duty this morning at the 7-11. It was the older cranky guy who, over time, has grown fond of me. My walk up and down telegraph was quiet except for the crows. I counted more than twenty before I finished my walk. They were in small groups in the street eating pizza and fries and other spilled food from the night's rowdy drunken time when people were trying to eat but couldn't quite get the food to their faces.It gets all kinds of messy here at night. The crows were not hungry this morning.There were always one or two nearby on the roof tops watching everything. 

I didn't see crows in Eureka. They were always sounding at a distance, that barking caw, someplace behind the redwood trees where I couldn't see them. I didn't see crows my first few days back either. Maybe I was being punished for being gone so long. Maybe they were there but my head wasn't quiet enough for me to see them. Today they were everywhere. I walked alongside them close enough to see their feathers and the dark color on their beaks. They let me get close unless I get the camera out. Then they move away. I feel lucky when they let me walk alongside them instead of a few feet back. I'm not accepted, just tolerated, some days. 

I don't know why crows are such an important part of my book, they just are. I can't remember exactly when I started paying such close attention to them, or them to me, I just remember my life before the crows and my life since. Now that they are back I feel relief. I can feel the pages of my book rustling in my head. I can see where I might start to write again, something that is not true in the first person I sense, not true in the rawness of dying. True in the sense of the fictions that are being told to me, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in a fast and furious mutter and it's time to get back to it before it disappears. 

I might have to take the writing out with me today. The house is needy in ways I can't meet because of the hand which is still raw and taking it's time to heal. The cat is needy in ways I can meet half way. I can't hold him right now and can just pet him with my left hand. But I feed him and take him outside and talk to him and feed him some more. He is something close to content again. He's looking less frail. So today might be a day I take the writing and some work out with me and find a place I can type where there are no cats and there is no visible dust to taunt me. 

And you. What are your crows? Do you have something in nature, or in your life that stirs you to write. Something outside  yourself that reminds you of what is waiting for you inside your head, between dreaming and the page? 

If you want to you could write from the perspective of a muse, a writing talisman, a favorite pen, an old typewriter, your computer. You could write from the perspective of the blank white paper stacked by the printer. Or a crayon sitting in the box that is an odd color, the lone sharp crayon, maybe it's that strange peach tone that was supposed to be skin color, or maybe it's brown, or green. 

Or you could write about writing. A writer sits at a table in a cafe, focused and scribbling in a notebook. What's being written. What are the writer's thoughts? 

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I was dreaming and then...

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I am like that wild____.....

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This is what I see when I walk down my street...or...this is what the outside looks like.

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She heard the rattle of keys and...

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Dawn
by George Hitchcock
Clouds rise from their nests with flapping wings, they whisper of worn leather, bracken, long horizons, and the manes of dark horses. In the waking stream the stones lie like chestnuts in a glass bowl. I pass the bones of an old harrow thrown on its side in the ditch. Now the sun appears. It is a fish wrapped in straw. Its scales fall on the sleeping town with its eyeless graineries and necklace of boxcars. Soon the blue wind will flatten the roads with a metallic palm, the glitter of granite will blind the eyes. But not yet. The beetle still stares from the riding moon, the ship of death stands motionless on frozen waves: I hear the silence of early morning rise from the rocks. Source: Poets.org *** If none of this works for you could set aside a time or even set an alarm for a time today when you know you'll have a few minutes, or more, to write or just sit and daydream about writing. Let that time, however long it is, belong to you, just for that. Whether pen hits paper or you just think awhile, or breathe. Hold that time as sacred for yourself. Even if it's just five minutes in a busy day. I hope this day is good to you and your creative.