2:30 AM

Am I the only one that wakes up pulsating with a storm of writing energy in the middle of the night when the rest of the people in the city are sleeping?

It’s weird. I wouldn’t consider myself as being the most loquacious person. I’m usually pretty quiet on most days. Speaking about my experiences and deep-rooted thoughts would probably be well beyond my comfort zone. I enjoy my quietude and I get made when the momentum is disrupted.  

It is almost as if my words are locked away in a hidden room of the movie theater of my mind. They do not tumble out of my heart because they are hidden from the world around me. I’m loaded down with baggage that I hardly ever share with anyone. But at night when I am sleeping, something amazing happens inside of me. Thoughts seem to rattle me awake and then my mind stays flooding with dialogue and I start drowning in thoughts. The words pour out of me like the waterfalls in Saut D’eau, Haiti, and weave onto the pages of my journal with an unstoppable force.

I never understand why 2:30 AM seems to be my time to set my mind free. I can’t help but to try to string them together and breathe life onto a blank page of a spiral bound notebook. But it has become impossible to avoid. Thoughts start steering the wheel of my life and I am forced to change lanes into writing, so that I don’t crash.

I have a whole song or story written out even before the sun climbs high and bright into the sky. I think about dancing in the rain on the white sand in Nassau, Bahamas and how much I am in love with traveling around the world. I picture some of the best moments and then some of the worse that shook me to the core and left me navigating the walls of hell. Regardless of the thought,

I start to convey my personality with my handwritten ideas.

A flurry of creativity knocks me out of sleep and into orchestrating lyrics. I embrace my thoughts and a new song is under construction in my mind as I lie on my silk, cherry red sheets, staring at the white ceiling of the four corners of my room.

As quietly as I stay in my daily life, even with the world all around me, my cries blare out loud into verse, chorus and bridge; college-ruled, line by line. How many thoughts have take residence in my heart that I simply did not communicate until I took out my pen and wrote them down?

I think that writing was designed to scintillate my life. Even when I was in the fifth grade, as an incipient writer, it was a way of making my frangible spirit better. How many aired out opinions of me by others, stayed as bright, shiny distractions from positivity, that keep me comfortable in my quietude from fear of other’s opinions because I started to believe that my thoughts did not matter. Negativity stayed entrenched in my mind and held me as its prisoner.

I tend to adjust my own thoughts into believing the lies that are spat out about me. Sometimes they spark a gushing of tears and other times, the low blows leave me breathless.

I am not sure why 2:30 became the time for me to think about things but for some reason, it has become my hour to write away my griefs and my struggles. The storm of energy that takes over my mind in full force during the middle of the night, is like the swirling red lights of a police car that can take over a driver’s attention on the road and cause rubber necking. The ideas are so up, close and personal that I can’t help but to give in to writing them down. Thank God that I keep a notebook squarely positioned on my oak night table. Other times, the notepad that is featured on my iPhone is a perfect place for me to extinguish the flames before they totally burn away my confidence.

I think that writing edges me into the direction of change. If my mind were a song, writing is the equalization that normalizes the levels to a positive wave of sound.

Writing stitches me back together like patchwork. It is almost like crazy glue as it firmly positions the pieces of my broken spirit back together. It constantly renews my view of my own self and the world around me. It helps me to understand who I am and how I can grow past my old thoughts. It helps me to get over the bitterness of the lemons and to turn it into sweet lemonade.

The energy and connection between me and 2:30 AM is incredible. It is weird how when I awaken from a harmonious dream, my field of attention always seems to turn to the clock with knowledge of the time, even before I see the numbers that read 2:30 AM. And under the moonlit sky from that point on until I’m no longer charged with high voltage inspiration, I write as free as a bird; sometimes the sunlight catches me still scribing. Even if I make the choice to not give in to the ideas that the nighttime energy brings, I find it hard to contain the lyrics that are emerging in my mind.

Maybe 2:30 AM is a spiritual time of day and God is simply grabbing my heart and welcoming me to the opportunity to be candid. Maybe this is the time when motivation seems to start brewing in my brain with a hodgepodge of flavors ready to burst.

Maybe this is the moment that I am meant to peek into my reality and have a nostalgic reunion with who I really am as opposed to the quiet internal person I have become. Or maybe it is the time that I am meant to start my day so that I can accomplish the missions meant to complete within it.

I don’t have to travel to Sochi to sit on the top of the heat-baked Caucasus Mountains to find inspiration for content. Sure, it would be an amorous adventure that would give me many things to talk about but, 2:30 AM always seems to come storming in.  I don’t have to walk a great distance in the midst of Prospect Park to find something juicy to write about. I definitely would be filled with thoughts about the beauty of the world within, but nothing like those at 2:30.

Nothing will ever expand my awareness of the reason why God seems to touch me with his grace wile I am in the midst of sleep but all I know is, the deliberate interruption of my REM cycle has become of critical importance to my life.