Insomnia

Hello, my name is Mireille and I am an insomniac. Such a cliché you may say, but wait till I tell you who greeted me one night while I was fighting my way to sleep. 

I was tired and had to wake up early the next morning. It was already too late to hope for a decent rest, but I thought I should get as much sleep as I could get, even if it was only for a couple of hours. 

As I struggled, I remembered what a friend of mine had told me once about relaxing one's eyelids in order to go to sleep and so I did, I relaxed them and waited endlessly to fall asleep, but it just wouldn't work. 

I tried to think about what people do to go to sleep, and after some pondering, I remembered the oldest trick in the book, and that is how I decided to count the sheep!

I closed my eyes one more time (eyelids relaxed), and lavishly planted the prairie in my imagination with the greenest and freshest of lawns. I put a door frame in the middle of the prairie and stood by it. The sheep started coming, and I started counting.

I had counted around 300 sheep when I remembered a billboard next to the office where I used to work at the time that encourages Lebanese to use the Arabic language and I realized I had been counting in French. I told the sheep to go back from where they came from and started the count again, this time using Arabic numbers.

Having counted yet another batch or 300 or so sheep, I decided that I need a way that enables me to identify my sheep if I should like to count them again another night, so I told the sheep to back away again and I labeled them each with a sort of marathon costume with a number, and when I was through, I counted yet again 300 or so sheep before I realized the labels were in Latin numbers!!! Horror of horrors!!!

"Back away sheep!"

I relabeled the sheep in Arabic numbers and made sure to count them in Arabic too this time.

Another batch of 300 had been counted one more time before I reckoned that the stable they were going in to only had a door frame, no walls and nothing to keep my sheep from straying or to keep a wolf from snatching one of them. I decided to place a bell around each sheep's neck and started counting again...Do I really need to tell you that I made - yet again - the counting in French mistake? I am sure you would rather be spared!

Before I decided to go to sleep, I had been watching the David Letterman show, and I think it is fairly understandable what had happened next. The bells around the sheep's necks were tolling and tolling, which gave me an awful headache, and hallucination at this point is perfectly justifiable...The sheep with their marathon labels (in Arabic!) and their bells around their necks changed their heads! Yes, their heads were replaced by David Letterman's head laughing at me!!!! Just imagine, or can you??

The other night, I couldn't sleep either, but I was determined not to count the sheep, understandably if you will. Instead, I recalled what another friend had advised me and I thought I should go with her opinion this time. She had told me I should decide what I would like to dream about and that will make me drift effortlessly to sleep in order to see the dream I longed to glimpse.

And since I had a feeling of heaviness over me that night, I decided I would like to dream of something light and floating in a way. The first thought that came to my mind was flying, but then I decided against it because it felt like I needed to be doing some sort of effort to fly, and I was tired. I then thought of being in a room full of feathers, but considered floating on a beautiful lake in a cave before I finally opted for the lake with the feathers spread in it.

Yes I had decided! This is what I want to dream about tonight! I want to float in that lake and be surrounded by feathers on the surface of the water!

Such a beautiful dream I am about to have, I thought as I relaxed my eyelids and chased the last sheep from my mind. Such beautiful dreams... oh wait, the feathers, where will they come from? From birds! Innocent Birds!!! But hunting is prohibited in Lebanon!!! Come here hunter! Police, quick! Arrest this man for he had broken the law and hurt innocent, innocent fragile birds!!! Police.... I called while floating in the lake of guilt and tumultuous sleep...

My Cat Made Me Cry

It is true. I am not sure if this should be ranked as embarrassing and pathetic or as sensitive and fragile. Mainly because I am not sure which of the aforementioned categories I actually belong to. 

I never thought that I could be so much moved and annoyed simultaneously. I am not sure which of these feelings dominated the other or which was the actual ignition for my tears. Nevertheless, I cried. I cried like I haven't cried - or allowed myself to cry to be more specific - in ages. 

In fact, I am lying. Not too many weeks ago I cried endlessly. But it had been a long time before that time since I had cried. And this is the truth.

I used to cry effortlessly before. Now it takes tons of problems, a huge amount of stress and exaggerated emotional wounds to topple one over the other to make me cry. And they are never the direct reason for the flow of tears. It is always another irrelevant yet significant incident that gets me going. 

My cat is in deep agony. She is a fantastic cat, but like any cat, she has reached that period where she needs to mate, and it is torturing her so much that she is spreading her anguish all over the place. It is distressing us all. We haven't slept in a week. We are kept awake by her constant never-ending mewing, if that is what it is called, because I am pretty sure there is another word for the horrible sounds she is making while she turns on her back and starts rolling around. She is growling, she is hissing, she is shrieking, she is screaming. 

Tonight, I was alone with her. I begged her to stop it, to shut up just for five minutes so I could catch up a bit on my sleep, to do me the favor of going back to being a "minor" cat that is just fuzzy and cuddly; she just wouldn't. She kept looking at me with those big passionate cuddly eyes while rolling over herself under my feet. I am not sure what was the first thought that came into my mind that second, but it was followed by a quick bunch of other frustrating thoughts, and all of a sudden I felt deeply depressed and tears came down flowing over my face. 

Yasmina - my cat - understood. Don't ask me how, don't ask me why, because I am anything but a cat expert. She just did. She stopped all the sounds and all the movements. She climbed up next to me, tuned around me cuddling my back, sat on my left, and she looked at me with the most understanding look ever, a look so piercing with sympathy and perception like you couldn't believe. She started caressing my hand with her paws. Yes, my cat cuddles me just like I cuddle her. It was her apology to me. And I accepted it with a wide open heart. 

Don't you dare laugh at me. This is an absolutely true story. You could always ask Yasmina if you don't believe me. You probably should actually; the communication I experienced with this tiny beautiful cat tonight was far beyond any I have had with another human being in quite a while now.