Sleepless nights

Another night, another journey through a space filled with little islands of fleeting sleep in a vast ocean of restless wakefulness.

After a night like that follows, inevitably, another day filled with exhaustion, disorientation.

I used to be one of those people who would not be woken if you dropped a bomb next to the bed, how things can change though...

Lying awake at night, and drifting in and out of sleep, can leave you with a very surreal feeling.
It has definitely confirmed the fact that we all dream, every night. To be aware of your dreams, and to be able to recall images, snippets of the emotions that were linked to a particular dream, has filled my head to the brim. Whilst I'm touched by a moment of sleep, I feel as if I'm under the water, covered by ice, just about touching the hazy transparent ceiling above me, ready to resurface at any time. Lately I have been caught talking in my sleep too, which does not surprise me a single bit. Apparently I must dream bi-lingual, talking a very individual cocktail of English and Dutch.

I have been recalling so many memories, feelings of old, that it's left me feeling scared. They say that just before you die, your life passes before your eyes, playing out like a movie. I must have been on the brink of death a hundred times over that past few years. Always in the deep dark hours of the night, when everything is so quiet that you can hear so many things that you've never heard before. Before the birds wake and start to twitter. When they finally do wake, and I'm still there lying in my nowhere land, the noise is almost deafening.

Some of the night noises are comforting, like for example the gentle rhythmic ticking of the clock, a sigh or a soft sleepy groan beside me, a lonely set of feet moving along the pavement beneath my bedroom window. All those things remind me of being a little girl and staying over at my granny and granddad's house. It was just a small place, with one spare room. In that room was an upright freezer, which was too big to fit into the small kitchen, and I remember feeling soothed by the soft "whirr" and "tick" of the freezer's compressor. Ever since then, the sound of a fridge or freezer has been linked to a warm and safe feeling. Just like certain smells or tastes can suddenly pull you back in time. At night, when I have been awake for long enough for my eyes to have adjusted to the dark shadows in the room, I go back to long lost times. I live my life over and over, while I really should be fast asleep, my brain switched to a setting which will clear the days' worries away. It doesn't happen that way, so I try to look for another outlet. I write, I paint and mostly I don't manage and my head feels too full. I have been told that my paintings have a certain darkness about them, a sort of mystery. Some are deliberately so, but seemingly I drag that same emotion in those paintings that are not intended to be like that.
I love the smell of oil paints, they too, remind me of my childhood. There was never a single time in my memory, when I was not aware of my mum painting. There were always canvasses around, commissions to be completed, collections of odd paintbrushes stood in glass jars...
I have my own glass jars these days, and canvasses, a pallet that is slowly starting to tell a story of many paintings.
My mum often jokes, according to her, she was especially creative and busy whilst she was pregnant with me, and one time she was so engrossed in her work that she accidentally took a sip of her jar of turps, instead of her coffee. "That is when," she says "the painting bug was fed right into you, through my blood into yours". This bug in the blood has been going for a number of generations it would seem. It has been passed from parent to child for as many generations as can be remembered. It seems though that in every generation there is only one, which I find remarkable. I feel very blessed to have been given this ability and the fact that I seem to have passed it on to my own daughter gives me as much pleasure as being able to enjoy my own creative side. I look forward to a future where I can share all the love for things beautiful and creative with this little person on who I seem to have left more than my fair share of a genetic imprint.

And then the reality dawns on me... That must be exactly how my own mother felt when I was just a small girl, yet now I am in another country, and in many more ways than purely the physical one of distance, I am far away. I hope, every day of my life, that I won't lose my own daughter, I have secret little daydreams of her living in the same village, having children of her own, and having all of that close to me. At the same time, I know that I will have no right of decision in those things. If she grows up with the need to go and spread her wings, I will only be able to watch her make her way into the world, under her own conditions. My son is already spreading his wings and while I'm so happy for him to be able to go out and discover far off places, just as he has always wanted to do, I also feel him slipping through my fingers. I can only watch him while still watching over him from a distance. I need to keep cupping him in my hands, like sand, knowing that if I were to squeeze in an attempt to hold on, the sand would only slip through my fingers faster.