Writings at Twilight

It’s a Friday night and I’ve just put my daughter to bed, but instead of reaching for a glass of wine I must instead start work on a travel feature with the obligatory looming deadline.

I pad around my boat for a while first, picking up the remnants of a day spent in my motherly role… felt-tips separated from their lids and lost on a journey into the sofa, dippy egg mashed into the dining room chair, a plastic horse that has decided to stray from the bridle path and into the thoroughfare – and then my foot.

There are days when I try to remember what it felt like to have all the time in the world to do just as I pleased, days when working a 9-5 seems like a pretty easy ride. I lament the fact that I never got to writing as much as I could when I had more time to do it. If I had put my mind to it I could have written five books during my twenties, I’m sure.

But then, the passing of time makes us richer in our ability to write and perhaps my writing is better now than it was then simply because I have more experience to spill into it, more passion, more insight – just more.

Perhaps it is the fact that I have to snatch dusky evenings and misty mornings away from the world – towards me – wrap these segments of landscape around my body, huddle beneath them and tap my fingers across the keyboard or scrawl messy lines in my notebook, that makes me write so much more than I did when I could?

Writing at twilight, that’s me. When the rush of the day has subsided, when the only sounds are that of my daughter and my dog breathing steadily… and my fingers gliding gently across the keyboard.