No Time to Put It Off

I used to find absurd the idea that I would write at night, after work.

“I’m a writer,” I’d tell people, and they’d at some point in the conversation mention their assumption that I must write at night.

No, no. Not at night. At night is when I do the things I like to do. The ones that require no thought or little effort. I watch TV or listen to a podcast while I put clothes away or start to make some pasta and forget that I put the water on to boil and get in the shower and hear something funny from the shower and have to get out and run really fast, dripping to turn the stove off and have to start the boiling over after I get out of the shower.

No, writing is a work thing. Nothing pisses me off more than having to bring work home from work and continue to work on it. In high school, when the homework was easy enough and it wasn’t a big project I’d rather procrastinate until the last minute, I did my homework as soon as I got home just to get it the fuck over with. I’d go to sleep at 9pm the night before a paper was due just so I could get a good night’s sleep before waking up at 4am to finish it. Let me get my work out of the way early, the things that require uninterrupted time and concentrated attention and lots of thinking. I like to have my fun at night.

Now things are different. Now I am only here for less than three more months before I leave this life I really love for one in the woods that I know I’ll love too but that’ll be a completely different world than where I am now, which, literally right now is sitting at my desk in my apartment that I love and will, in less than three months, leave. How’s that for a run-on sentence? That was rhetorical.

I teach two yoga classes on Monday nights, one at 5 and one at 6:15. I should take the 7:30 every Monday, since I’m already there and I need to do yoga at least once a week, and I do mean at least. Most Mondays I don’t stay. I go to the grocery store, come home and cook, and watch something on Netflix. Tonight, I stayed for yoga at 7:30. I came home and cooked and ate, and now I’m writing. At night.

With three months left it’s starting to feel very urgent I do the things that matter to me from this life while I can. I don’t have time to put it off.

Neither do you, just by the way.