Between Sleeps

My new normal, my late recovery normal, looks like this:

I fall asleep around 8 p.m. I wake up somewhere between midnight and 1. I stay up until about 5. Then I fall asleep again for an hour or two. Then I get up, layer myself in the warmest riding gear I own because it’s fucking cold, and hit the streets of Santa Fe.

Sometimes I’m hunting coffee. Sometimes breakfast.

Sometimes I’m just chasing that calm space that only exists on two wheels in traffic, that strange serenity where you’re fully present, fully alert, and somehow at peace inside the chaos.

Then I go home. Eat some questionable food. Rinse. Repeat.

Normal. For now.

Normal until I return to work.

But I left out the best part: I write.

When I wake up at midnight, I pick up whatever I was working on and I write. When I wake up in the morning, I open a blank Word doc and dump my brain onto the page until a theme reveals itself, then I write that. Maybe it becomes a blog post. Maybe a short story. No way of knowing until it’s done.

When I come home between rides? I write. When I come home for the night? I write until sleep takes me again.

This, all of it, is my new normal.

And honestly? I fucking love it.

I love the work I’m producing. I love the stories coming out of me. I wish I could share them all right now, but I can’t, not yet. Publishing turns out to be a whole thing. Complicated. Slow. Layered. Two books are written and moving through the machine, along with short stories headed to publication.

When they’re out, I’ll share them. Links and all. And down the road, I’ll pull the short fiction together into a collection and publish that too.

Last night, between my first and second sleep, I finished another short story. One that had been itching to be written for days. Another entry in my queer story collection.

I call it queer because it comes from a transgender lived experience, but it’s not polite, sanitized, or packaged for ideology. My writing doesn’t march in lockstep with anyone. And that’s intentional.

This isn’t a political rant, though. So I’ll leave that there.

What matters is this: Things are moving.

Yes, I still have hard days. But the hard parts are physical: the recovery, the body catching up. The writing? The writing heals me. It steadies my mind, which settles my body, which restores my spirit. It’s a loop. A goddamn good one.

So here I sit, at 5:30 in the morning, writing about writing. Writing about nothing in particular. And loving every minute of it.

Thought I’d share.