The Moon Caught Me Working

Late Night Thoughts and Scribbles

It was almost eleven when I noticed the full moon outside my window.

The living room was dark, lit mostly by a Roku screensaver, the desktop monitor beside me, and the kitchen light spilling down three little steps from about ten feet away. The house had settled into that particular kind of noisy quiet that feels necessary when you are trying to create something. Not silent enough to feel like the beginning of a horror movie. Not loud enough to interrupt the thoughts finally willing to come out.

Background noise for the brain. A little artificial glow for whatever the hell happens after dark...

And there it was.

A full moon, sitting perfectly within view while I worked on The Velvet Ledger.

My first thought was not especially profound.

Wow, there is really a full moon out there right now, at this particular moment?

Because apparently the moon also appreciates good branding.

I believe in signs, coincidences, divine timing, dumb luck, and probably several other things that contradict one another. My personal belief system is less of a straight line and more of a junk drawer. There is no telling what is in there, but I remain convinced I might need all of it someday.

I still kind of believe I broke my arm because I closed a knife I did not open.

So, yes. When a full moon appears outside my window while I am building a dark little corner of the internet for my thoughts, I notice.

The sky has always been good at getting my attention. The stars especially. Orion’s Belt has followed me through different houses, different versions of myself, and more late night drives than I could count. I do not know why it pulls at me. Maybe we are not meant to understand every strange attachment we have. Maybe some things just feel familiar before we ever learn their names.

Night has always felt familiar to me too.

There is too much to do during the day. Too many responsibilities standing around with clipboards. Daylight wants plans, productivity, phone calls, clean counters, answered messages, and proof that you are using your limited hours responsibly.

Night does not give a shit.

Night gives you permission to disappear into something.

There is time to write and write without worrying that someone might wander past and catch an unfinished thought sitting naked on the screen. There is privacy for stupid ideas to become interesting ones. There is music, wild imagery, old movies, strange muses, bad decisions, beautiful mistakes, and that familiar obsession with anything dark, creepy, intriguing, or just a little bit sexy.

The interruptions are better at night too. A smart ass teenager wandering in with some story that absolutely could have waited until morning. A pet demanding attention like it pays the mortgage. Little reminders that the house is alive, even while everybody is tucked into their own corners of it.

I have always craved the freedom of staying up until the night runs out. Unfortunately, I also enjoy coffee in the morning and maintaining the illusion that I have my shit together, so we compromise. I stay up late-ish. The night gets custody of me for a few hours, then returns me to adulthood by breakfast.

Lately, those hours have mattered more.

Moving has been a doozy of a rollercoaster. I have spent more time feeling sorry for myself than I care to admit, but somehow, I have also felt more content than ever. There has been abundant family, lovely down time, and a new home slowly learning our noises.

There has also been the nagging loss of a friendship, the deliberate cutting back of photography, and a week when my autistic son spiraled so severely that the hurt spread through our entire immediate family.

Contentment and misery make strange roommates.

Maybe that is why music has been working overtime as personal therapy again. Hello, elder emo millennial. Some people meditate. I replay one painfully accurate lyric until it has successfully rearranged my internal organs.

Dark lyricism does not make the pain disappear, but it gives it somewhere to go. It takes the mind trapped misery cloud and turns it into rhythm. A sharp line. A chorus screamed in the car. Proof that somebody else has stood in the ugly middle of something and made art from it.

That is what this feels like too.

Not an escape exactly. Not a grand new beginning wrapped in pretty paper. More like catching a flash of someone I used to know.

Me.

The girl who could spend night after night lost in music, movies, imagery, muses, mistakes, and whatever strange idea had her completely possessed at the time. The one who wanted to make things simply because something inside her would not leave her alone until she did.

She is older now. More tired. Better at coffee. Surrounded by bigger kids, loving pets, unfinished rooms, old grief, and a louder awareness that time is moving whether she approves of it or not.

That part has been haunting me lately.

My kids are growing up. We are all getting older. Friendships can end even when you thought they belonged in the permanent collection. There never seems to be enough time, or at least not as much as I would like.

For the record, I would absolutely consider eternity as a vampire.

Maybe our obsession with time is exactly why small moments like this matter.

People stop noticing them. We lose connection, meaning, gratitude, hope. True passion gets traded for convenience. Wonder starts needing a practical purpose before we allow ourselves to indulge in it. We become too distracted, tired, cynical, or embarrassed to admit that sometimes the moon outside the window feels personal.

But maybe it is worth letting a moment mean something simply because it found you at the right time.

Maybe the moon did not appear for me. Maybe it was just doing what it has done for longer than any of us can comprehend.

Still, it caught me working.

It caught an old version of me flickering back to life beneath the blue and purple neon glow of that screensaver. It caught me making something from the hurt instead of letting it rot quietly in the background. It caught me searching, writing, remembering, and trying to build a place where all these strange thoughts might finally be meaningfully noticed.

Not liked. Not scrolled past. Not fed to some hungry algorithm and forgotten.

Understood.

Perhaps that is the real reason we create anything. We are leaving little signals in the dark, hoping another rare creature recognizes the language.

Tonight, the sky answered first.