Sometimes

Sometimes, when I'm lying in bed waiting for my brain to shut down so I can fall asleep, I'll think of something.  Of course, when I'm lying in bed with my overactive brain jumping up and down I am always thinking of something.  But sometimes, and only sometimes, I will think of something different. 

I know that I always think of things differently.  Sometimes, though, I will think of a different thing and also think about it differently than if I were somebody else.  Somebody else's brain might not jump up and down - and mine doesn't always, sometimes it dances - but maybe theirs just strolls along lamp-lit avenues and falls asleep very fast, so that their thoughts just blend into their dreams.  Then when they wake up they forget it all and whatever was different becomes something same again.

Sometimes, when I'm lying in bed, and my brain is walking backwards on a railing, I will think of something different.  And then I will want to not fall asleep, because I might lose it.  I will think very hard on that different something, so hard that my brain is thinking of the something in six different ways at once.  Maybe I leave the original something and find the diamond inside the original casing.  Maybe there is no diamond and I find myself back at the beginning and cut down that tree and burn it.  I've thought all I can on it - at least all one can while their brain is walking backward on a tightrope and wishing it could be asleep.

Then the something different will go away, and I will be sad.  I'll wish I had written it down, but perhaps if I'd shoved the blankets off and shivered with my pen and nightlight, the inky thoughts on paper would not be the same different that they were in my head.  That is always my fear. 

I can't even tell you about the different things that I think about most of the time, because they are very different in my head than they are here, or out loud.  I can tell my invisible friends, because of course they are just really me and I understand myself best, except for God, and when I don't want to.

Then, when I don't want to understand, and I just want to talk, the different something becomes very complicated.  Sometimes I will dream about it and it will freak me out.  Mostly I don't dream about what I think.  Mostly, I dream about what I don't think, and I wish I did.  Because even if my thoughts are so very different and walk backward, at least I know what they are because I am thinking them in the way that I want to think them, instead of being stuck inside a dumb dream situation that I can't get out of.

I can never wake up when I want to.  And I can never fall asleep when I want to.  I am just stuck with thinking, because that is what I do.  I think, and sometimes it's just me, and sometimes it's all over the place.  Which is also me, but different, sometimes.