chaos.

I’m awake right now, and writing here, because I can’t fall asleep. I can’t fall asleep because I found a cockroach in the kitchen, and although it isn’t my first, I am still wildly afraid of them. So I’m waiting for J to come home and inspect all the cupboards for me so that I can fall asleep and not dream of cockroaches marching into my bed.

Our apartment was broken into last week, and while I know rationally that it won’t happen again, that the reasons it was possible for someone to get in have been fixed, it just occurred to me that I haven’t tried to fall asleep here alone since that happened.

Our schedules (really, J’s schedule) can be wacky. I wake up early. Rehearsals and shows and meetings tend to happen late at the theatre, so J often works late. When I first moved here, it took some adjusting - being alone often at night, eating dinner alone, sometimes going a week or more only seeing each other for a few minutes. It isn’t ideal, but also plenty of people manage worse. There are people who work actual night shifts, or people who are deployed, or are on call. We manage.

I’ve been writing this week, and it’s good. I read a chapter in Writing Down the Bones this weekend that I desperately needed. To paraphrase, life will always be chaos, so write through it, despite it, about it, but don’t let it stop you. Life is chaos, but sometimes it feels a bit wilder. Sometimes it feels like serious mental juggling to keep track of the lists and the tasks and the things-to-worry-about (which I can’t help). When all of that is swirling around, the thought of sitting down and calmly picking up pen and notebook seems ridiculous. But I’m doing it anyway. In the midst of 1) moving 2) looking for jobs 3) looking for apartments 4) deciding to get married, the one thing that I need to do is keep writing.

Keep writing keep writing keep writing keep writing.

When cockroaches and insomnia and the universe of chaos give you the window to write, just shut up and do it.