Just before four in the morning, I lean back into my chair and it creaks making an obnoxiously loud sound for this late hour. The scripts are running, the models continue to build, and I close my eyes. Tiredness washes over me, the muscles in the small of my back are throbbing and my throat feels parched even though I just drank some water.

R.E.M. is playing over my headphones, old songs that I like, that I remember, old songs that transport me to a room with wood paneling where the window looked over thick woods, where I listened to these songs and watched the deer drift in and out of the mist and the snow.

A day ago, while cleaning my office, I came across an old, plastic binder with an outrageous cover - seals on an iceberg under a sci-fi sky - and I know what's inside. Pieces of paper and a leather covered book, a small handful of letters and a few photographs. They smell like parched earth and dust. I read the words inside the diary, the folded pieces of paper, and there is no difference in the ache, the embarrassing vulnerability, the desperate yearning from across a gap of fourteen years.

I'm still that clumsy, awkward, desperate boy. You might think years make a difference but genes are a hard thing to fight and this just confirms my suspicions further regarding predestination forced by our neural chemistry. Ah, well. Close the book, lock the ugly cover with the Velcro tab and put it in the box, away from sight again for a few years.

Back in my office, in the dark, with music leaking out of my headphones, I think even a year ago, two years ago, I would be writing, up at four in the morning, listening to music that transports me, and putting down words that spell out places and people that are contained in my head. I miss it so much, but every time I sit down to write, the words spell hollow and empty in my mouth.

The three shell windows are counting down slowly as they have for hours. One at 25%, another at 82% and the last having just finished, elapsed time 4:25:07. The white cursor winks from the black console. I wait a few more minutes, the way the process works, once the models hit 25%, the other 75% is just writing out the file details, so that goes every quickly, all the indexing has finished at this point.

The words come over the headphones along with those two reverb-laden chords and that hypnotic bass riff, "I don't sleep, I dream." Fourteen years ago, in the spring of my Senior year, while editing the school literary magazine, I wrote a story about a boy living with his mother at the edge of the sea, and one day, walking along the beach finds an empty and burned out house and within it, one preserved room where a girl poisoned long ago talks with him. (Some small part of my mind wonders if a couple of those magazines are still in that old, ugly folder - I didn't remember seeing them on Sunday night.) When the faculty adviser approved the story for the magazine, I put those words at the beginning, with the header. I don't sleep, I dream. Because the story was like a dream manifested into reality for me, the first time I wrote something that meant a whole lot to me. The first time I wrote a story and sat back, and saw something more than I intended, when the alchemy of words created a transcendent experience. I can't remember the last time I felt that way.

I can never find enough words to express just what I feel. The weight of personal experience is so great, the well of emotion so deep, so many details roll up to mean just one word that it all seems like an exercise in futility to even try.

The songs fades out to nothing, and I pull the headphones away from my head, put them down. I don't want drag myself over the years again. The shells are all at 100%. I bring up the application, load the models, and everything seems fine.

The only light in the house still on is in the foyer leading to the bedroom and I see Donna walking towards me, mostly asleep. "Come to bed," she says annoyed and sleepy at once. I could linger here for a bit more, and if it wasn't this desperately late, maybe I could even try to write something, or at least read an old story. But I just nod instead and a minute later, I log out and follow her to bed, falling asleep slowly.

If I dreamed that night, I didn't remember on waking.