Words tease me awake. Long before the dog nudges me as an alert that his bladder has reached its capacity. Long before hubby has stumbled to his closet, pulled a shirt off a hanger, kissed me goodbye and driven off to work. Sometimes I've been dreaming a line of a poem or an ending to a chapter I've been struggling with. Often it's pure nonsense. Yet there they are, precious words dancing on the end of my eyelids, tickling my tongue, tingling at the ends of my fingertips, awaiting their release onto the stark white pages of my bedside notebook or the sterile computer screen.
If I'm lucky.
Sometimes I'm unable to capture them, and what might have been haunts me through my day. I'm always certain those morning dream words were my salvation: the beginning of the very poem The New Yorker can't possibly reject; the solution that gets one of my characters off that bench in Central Park; the ending for my short story about the couple having a fight in MOMA.
And today is one of those days those words are teasing me, hovering over my shoulder, slightly out of reach, whispering too softly for me to hear them, their brilliance fading in the bright sunlight of a day too filled with distractions.
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