Nighttime Meds

My nighttime meds brought me back here. It's past my bedtime. My new healthy bedtime, two hours before the bedtime I've fallen into of late. The bedtime that falls long after I have fallen face first into a book. What happens is that I read and then my eyes close and I dream what comes next in the story and then I wake up and what I dreamt is not what the writer wrote.
I do this for a couple of hours on average.
I am determined to stop, which is why I must keep this entry short.
My nighttime meds brought me back here, telling me I could stay up for hours baring my soul. I could stay up all night writing about how much I love the people I love and why and how. If I didn't have a new bedtime, I would stay up writing about surf scoters and buffleheads. I've had buffleheads confused with goldeneyes and so much more. I would write about what marriage means to me now that I'm in love with the man I married and divorced. I would write about an amazingly brilliant and beautiful friend I have who makes me laugh and think and want to be a better realer person. I would write about three cats who are curing me with their tongues, late night sighs and bad breath.
Sometimes my nighttime meds bring me to tears, wretched, heaving, pot-scraping tears and sometimes to the back of the closet where I keep a box of photographs. Sometimes they bring me to an ecstatic gratitude for life and to my bookshelves where I pull down volume after volume, ravenously hungry for all there is to say and passionate for my people: the ones who live for words.
But now, it's my new bedtime. Somebody with four legs just ran across my roof. The moon is gibbous and waxing. I'm going to bed without a book. Maybe.