Sleep Season

In spring things happen.

I suppose that's vague, but for the past two years spring has marked things, hard things, for me. Death, mostly, although I suppose that is a bit blunt.

Bears sleep through the winter, and sometimes I think I need to sleep through the spring and summer, because while the rest of the world is reborn I think of my grandfather, my cousin, and my childhood best friend. The list keeps getting longer. Names ticked off every year since 2009. If I were to list them we would be here so long.

And what does this have to do with writing?

Let me go back to bears. Bears do not actually hibernate. Their temperatures don't drop enough, and you can rouse a bear out of it's winter sleep (although I'm not sure you'd want to). Regardless, for months during the winter, they conserve energy and sleep, working on gaining back their strength.

I haven't written since last winter, not really. I also didn't go out much, or do much of anything but whatever it is my boyfriend wanted to do. I read a lot. I read facts and fiction and figures and lies. I read anything. I read Animorphs, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I read Heimskringla and The Sevenwaters Trilogy. I read books by Murakami, and stories by King and Plath and Ellen Degeneres's book, which was very funny and made me smile. I even kept up with politics. I also sat in a lot of parks and in a lot of dark rooms. Grief, my therapist called it.

I came up with ideas. In March, there was a story about death. Before that, a story about suicide and alternate worlds. Some fairy stories, and one I dreamed up. Playing cards. I haven't written any of them, because when I tried I got so tired. I wasn't in the mindset. I want to be -- I am -- a writer, but I couldn't write. It took too much out of me, so I wrapped myself up in a cocoon of words and decided to learn instead.

And what I learned is that despite all the people who tell you that to be a writer you need to be or do something, that you need to always write, every day, those people are wrong. That you can sometimes not be ready to write. That sometimes it's better to step away, because the things you wrote for money were smothering you, because the ghosts of people you once knew were waiting on the edges of your pages and you weren't ready to see them yet.

Ever since my friend died this spring, I've dreamed of her. I think I've been scared of what her death will bring to my stories, because this time last year I was not afraid of churches or text messages, and all the writing I had to do was not so serious or so much a part of me as it is now.

Sometimes I think writers should be like bears, if only to see how much they have to learn about themselves, because often that is the most important story.