purple cat nightmares

"Erratic" is the word I was looking for, but which my scrambled brain failed to remember for at least the last ten minutes. That word is exactly the term I needed to describe my sleeping pattern of late.

Near enough every night I have been up until well past 2 o'clock in the morning, and have then tried to go to bed, feeling sufficiently exhausted, only to just lie there, head buzzing with thoughts and ideas, failing miserably to fall asleep.

Every night, in those early quiet hours, you can find me here at, or not too far away from my trusted laptop. I'm still building my web shop and it's slowly starting to take shape. The shelves still need a lot of filling up, some of the legal nitty gritty, like terms and conditions needs sorting out, but the layout and design are more or less in place.

Normally, I'm mostly typing in values, text, etc.., one eye on the PC, and another on the big fat manual. Last night however, it all got a bit more exciting (you are about to find out how pathetically unexciting my little life really is...). All these products have to be photographed in order to show potential customers what they look like, and that is exactly what I did last night.

You should have seen it! The makeshift photographic studio of the year was constructed : One length of white satin and a few pegs; the satin is to be attached to the extraction fan, using aforementioned pegs, making sure that the top is sufficiently gathered. Drop down length of satin, in front of cooker, where a strategically placed ironing board serves as a shelf. The "shelf", a.k.a. the ironing board, needs to be covered with the satin as it comes down, so to create a continuous flow of fabric, moving from vertical to horizontal position in one flowing sweep. Then you collect the uplighter/reading lamp combo from the sitting room, and places it to the left side in front of the arrangement of shelf and backdrop. It is very important that great care is taken when pointing the "reading lamp" spotlight, at the arrangement. In the depths of my store room I still had a slightly lopsided adjustaform bust. However, she is a rather offensive shade of purple, and her "legs" (metal stand) have been lost a long time ago. All was resolved using a polo neck jumper of Little Haggis and by perching her on the "shelf". As soon as this set-up had been put together, I discovered the next problem: the whole point of dragging the bust out, was that I had scarves to photograph. It turned out though, that the neck on the bust was much too short, in fact it was almost non-existent. After a few moments of rummaging around the storage cupboard, I found just the thing: a white ceramic plant pot, just about "neck-sized", carefully placed upside down on the little stomp of neck of Mrs. Adjustaform. So there we go, the set up completed, I could finally get going.

After lots of clicking and zooming, I finally managed to successfully put about 12 different designs of scarf in the picture!

The results are now available to see at www.purplecatbycindy.com. You don't know how pleased I feel with the progress of my site. All I need now is visitors, and of course for some of them to like the site and its contents enough to become a customer...

Here's hoping.

Dark

Everything is dark,
dark and empty.

We fell out this morning, not the first time. It has haunted me all day, filled my head with doubt, left me uncertain.
He's asleep down the stairs, on the sofa, courtesy of his snoring problem which keeps me awake all night long.
It begs the question: "Why does the sound of his (relatively soft) snoring disturb me so much, why can't I find comfort in it, like many others do?"
Lately, I find myself more and more lost a world unknown, filled with very familiar corners.
I'm never far away from a very bright and far too noisy dream. Dreams and reality have begun to melt into one, and I ask my children if they can recall something or other, only just remembering myself, that it only happened in one of my wacky journeys of semi-unconsciousness.

This evening I dozed of, just for a moment, in the sofa. My little girl came through to tell me something... and I asked:"Is het nu al klaar??!" (Is it ready already??! in Dutch). She asked "What??" in a very uncomprehending tone of voice. I just don't know where things keep coming from. My question held no relevance to her message. Increasingly I find so many things that hold no relevance to everything else surrounding it.

Most of all, I wonder if I'm on the path that was cut out for me.
I look around me and sometimes, everything, except my children, seems so alien.
Life feels too heavy to bear, the days too bright, the nights too dark. At the same time, for some strange reason that I can't explain, I somehow seem to skip the daylight. My mind plays tricks on me, locks me in a windowless box, leaves me unaware of the day opening up and closing again.
Nighttime is too dark, and yet, under the blanket of darkness I seem to feel sheltered and desperately lonely all at once. Like swimming in a dark warm womb, and then suddenly realising that the umbilical cord is missing, I'm on my own.
The man on the sofa down the stairs is miles away, he cannot reach inside my shell. He's a good man, and yet at times I don't know who he is, I look at him as he walks through the door, and I wonder: "Who is this familiar stranger?"
Something about him fits me perfectly, like comfortable slippers, a feeling of home... And other things send shivers down my spine, make me want to run. It's nothing he's done wrong, I just can't put my finger on it.

Exhaustion overwhelms me on a daily basis. Is it a result of my insomnia? Could it be that simple? Are all these demanding muddled up thoughts wearing me out?

A fitting answer would be so blissful...

At 16, I was a little bird, not yet ready to fly, I fell out of the nest... somehow I've made it this far, flying and falling along the way, never quite mastered the correct technique of using my wings to their best ability, but I'm still as lost as I was on the day I fell out. I want to be in the egg again, start all over, feel sheltered.

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.