I find I only ever write when I stay up too late.
Sitting alone in a darkened room does wonders for my ability to think too much to sleep easy.
I also find that after a couple hours to myself I am increasingly prone to bouts of emotional daydreaming. I am, when not sufficiently distracted by nonsense or fatigue, incredibly susceptible to nearly crippling nostalgia. When I allow myself to stray too long on a certain thought, image, song, anything that puts me in a particular state of mind, I can tumble down the rabbit hole - chasing the wistful memory of a feeling long since gone, without hope of truly recapturing it.
It's nice to be able to find all the songs that soundtracked a particular time in my life when the mood strikes though, it creates a more immersive melancholy. I ache for a youthful, reckless, incomparably exquisite love that escaped me; a youth that slips away more completely each day; simpler times surrounded by friends; a family not broken and scattered.
Were I happier in my life as it is, I imagine such exercises would be less consuming. The thought just wormed its way into my mind that my life is demonstrably worse in most every way than it was ten years ago, which only serves to deepen the unsatisfied longing brought on by my retrospective ruminations.
I leave off determined to improve things somehow tomorrow, full of the knowledge that sleep has a way of sapping resolve.
