Awake

So here I sit at 6:49 in the morning, and I've already been awake for nearly three hours. I guess I woke up when my brother was getting ready to go to work because when I went to wash my face the bathroom was hot with steam and the mirror was fogged up, so I could only see a vague reflection of myself.

I lay in the dark for awhile, thinking and thinking and thinking. You've been there before: Thinking is the worst act to lead a person back to sleep. But I've never been good at quieting my mind. When I was in high school and I used to wake up in the middle of night, I would sit and write for awhile, and I would usually fall back to sleep after a poem or two. I should have done that this morning I suppose, but I left my notebook at school, and I have issues with typing poems straight to the computer without handwriting them first; maybe it's a nostalgia for the pre-digital age or maybe it's simply that I find the words easier with a pen in my hand.

So instead I've sat awake and watched the dawn creep through the windows of my den.

I hate confusion. I have an intense desire to control everything that I possibly can in my life. I'm old enough to know by now that some parts of my life are beyond my control, but I have also learned to recognize what I can control. Confusion is a lack of understanding, and when I can't understand something, I can't control it. The most frustrating part of interacting with other people is the confusion they cause. Sometimes I want to scream at them, and I think it stems from the lack of control I have over their decisions--their decisions that ultimately affect the course of my life. What do I say when I think someone is making the wrong decision? It seems that no matter how eloquent my argument comes out, it fails to move some people.

I hate not having control.

And so instead of sleeping until 10 like I should on my first Monday off, I woke up in the dark and lay in bed and thought.

Some way to spend a Monday morning, huh?