She lay awake in bed, struggling to find the bit of sleep she had been pulled from, but it wouldn't come.
She listened to the rhythm of the falling rain. It's a gentle sound on the roof. Normally it would lull her to sleep, as it had done earlier, but not now. All manner of things raced through her mind. Things that lay hidden from the light of day, the things that worried her or were concerns.
Her eyes were heavy with the promise of sleep as she tried to get back. Back to the arms of the man who waited for her in her sleep. He often pulled her into his arms, as if he were Morpheus himself bringing sleep to her. Though her mind was churning, thought after thought, she finally heard his call.
"Come back, come back to me. I want you in my arms, come back to me. Come lay in my arms", he said to her.
She felt his arms wrap around her, warm, strong and safe.
Finally she couldn't take anymore and rolled over to check the time. It's 6:15, she thought to herself. Too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep. During the night she had wakened and the rain had lulled her back to sleep. Still the rain fell and she had hope it would again take her to that place of sleep. The rain fell gently on the skylights of her bedroom. The soft sound was relaxing.
Her thoughts roamed from thing to thing and she was getting annoyed.
"If my mind would only let me focus on the rain I may fall back to sleep", she complained to the empty room. She hadn't noticed that the rain had become more intense.
Now she was awake because the rain had gone from a gentle sound to just noise.
'I wonder what the rain will sound like on the roof of the new house' she thought.
Then a list of things she wondered about the new house flooded her mind. Money, furniture, phone, cable or satellite, the list just seemed to grow.
Growing bored of laying in the dark, she turned on the light. Finally some words she had been trying to find were escaping her mind. She began to write them down as they came, trying to get the in some sense of order.
As she was writing, the skin on her hand caught her attention, distracting her from her task. It wasn't as smooth as it was when she was younger she noted. She laughed to herself at the thought. It made her sound like she was in her nineties. Her great grandmother had passed down a wisdom. As you grow older, never put your hands up by your face. They tell a lady's age. Funny enough it was true. Just the other day she had been to see her own sister and she noticed her sister's hands. They were the hands of an older woman, no longer young and supple.
Years before her own mother had made the statement that it was funny how as women got older they usually acquired beautiful rings. The only problem was the rings were displayed on gnarly hands. She smiled to herself because though she knew her mother had told the truth, she just never thought she'd see it in her sister or herself.
Her thoughts shifted to how she had never liked her own hands. Her fingers were short and her hands were wide, not at all feminine. They were however Childers hands, there were family characteristics that she had always had. So unlike her own mother's hands, which were long and slender, feminine hands. The Stallings were all like that, or at least the ones she had ever met. Finally she admitted that her whole body had taken after the Childers side of the family. She really didn't stand a chance.
The rain had changed to a light rain, not noticeable unless you listened. What the point of trying to get back to sleep now. She was awake and continued writing.
Her thoughts wandered from getting up and making coffee to love. Who was it that said you only get one true love in your life? Or was it one great love. She could never remember. Was love an illusion we hoped to find or was it something real? What is it really? She only knew it had eluded her so far in this life. 'Ugh, that sounds so negative' she thought to herself. What was it about love that escaped her? It's not that she ever expected to be swept off her feet by some knight in shining armor but it would nice to feel love. Maybe it was that her expectation of love was more than it really was. What if it were only mediocre and not what she had thought it would be? She thought back on the men that had been in her life. The two she loved had hurt her and the others were just, well others. It occurred to her as her mind quickly wandered away from that thought, was she was trying to rationalize by saying there are many types of love. 'Oh please who are you trying to convince' she thought, it's nothing more than an illusion, a slight of hand. Still there was a part of her that didn't want to believe that was true. It wanted to believe there was a universe shaking thing called love. She just hadn't found it.
Is it that until you love yourself that you can't find love? The sounds of her stomach growling distracted her from her thoughts. She crawled out of bed and headed to the kitchen to cook breakfast.