Middle of the night, lying awake in the dark, starts with the nightmares then turns to the sleepless nights. Pretty predictable actually. I wonder sometimes how regular it really is, perhaps I need to keep a log of some kind. "Here is where the nightmares commence". There is also a period of long sleep where I can't seem to sleep enough. My sleep follows a pattern as sure as the stars move about the night sky. Of course I am aware that the stars don't move, it is the earth but my sleep may follow the rotation of the earth for all I know. This post is connected but you must trust me.

Orion comes into view with the winter sky. I have always felt a connection to that constellation. It is silly of course as it is nothing but a collection of stars named by a centuries old culture that knew nothing of the far flung galaxies sharing our universe. But still, it brings with it an emotion both comforting and depressing.

I am making an effort to learn the words to a song. It has been years since I have done this. I actually can't remember the last song that stirred my desire to sing. Since not long after I met My Darling I lost the urge to sing much. After so many years, feeding my addiction to attention in darkened bars before an audience waiting for their turn on the stage, for their turn in the light, I had enough. Some of the crowd felt I didn't belong, just good enough to be intimidating, never good enough to be much more. Oh, I could have maybe traveled around from dingy bar to dingy bar entertaining the patrons who spend their weekends as I used to, drowning their plain boring lives and distracting themselves from the reality that this is as good as it gets. Surely the most telling line from the movie titled the same. What if this is as good as it gets? (I love you Jack.)

The song speaks to where I was and where I pulled myself out of. Not at all by myself but with the aid of others who had blazed a path ahead of me some of whom passed me on their way back down. You can bring a nutter to medication but you can't keep him compliant.

I sit in a waiting room every three months or so (used to be every other week but I got tired of paying someone to be my friend) with people who share a common thread, we are not right. We don't have all the right wiring. The doctor checks me over mostly by acing me if I feel ok, and renews my prescriptions. It makes me thankful for pharmaceuticals and compassionate for the many born without gifts that so many others enjoy and whom take for granted. I have a brother who will never be able to live independent of our parents. He has neither the brains or the skill sets to create a successful life. He was also born without good looks to ride in stead for his lack of intellect. So many people share his fate and our more fortunate humans would dismiss then as undeserving. They would point to their lack of success and mental health issues and deem them without value. They would cast them out, or allow them to die, participate in their death even. How can I not have compassion when not so very long ago before I found the proper medication I counted these people as compatriots, more comfortable in that world even today. You see for all my education I lack the skill set to travel in higher circles than the one I was born into.

I had more then than just a unfettered disease that damaged my body and punished my mind leaving holes I will probably never fill, I had a rich voice, full of passion and tempo, some of which graced these pages only but others that saw a much larger audience. But my voices went silent, so many poems shelved, my drawings are both wrinkled and forgotten, stuffed into cupboards and closets and in some cases lost forever.

Out of nowhere today I spoke of theatre, not of my performances but my participation, in education. I could kindly take a weak performance and give both critic of the bits of the performance that needed something more and praise for the strengths and enthusiasm that obviously drive one to not only work weeks to perform but even pay someone to come out and review said performance. A passion for the act that extends to an aspiration, even they will never be more than a small community theatre putting out a few shows a year for a small loyal audience of friends, family and lovers of the stage. They stride the boards with passion.

I envy them. Still I have no desire to join them. It is not the act but the passion that I envy. It is the Passion that I lost. Not love, I still have so much I love, my family and few friends are loved with all my heart but the passion I speak of forces fingers to keyboard, prose, poetry, pencils to paper, paints of all kinds in broad and delicate strokes, fired with nothing but passion. Passion that forces you to raise you voice in song, no matter a venue but for your own pleasure. Before it was the scaffolding that kept me out the the deepest depth of the pitch dark the same passion that gave me wings so I could circle the spires of euphoria. How can I used those scaffolds to reach toward the spires I once toured?

Winter is just not my season. Can I find my ladder to the stars? Maybe Orion knows the way.

I wish you Peace

~alison~

�