1001 Nights Cast

Last night I couldn’t sleep. It was the first hot night of the year. The air was heavy, the sheets, the pillows, the bed all radiated heat.

I got home from our neighbour’s at a decent hour, conscious of our appointment. However, I did manage to drink more red wine than I intended. As you know, this isn’t so unusual for me, but over the long winter I had forgotten how red wine raises my body temperature. When the nights heat up, I lie awake, my heat radiating in sympathy with the darkness.

In the realm of minor complaints, there is nothing I hate more than being unable to sleep. It is where I leave all my stress of the day. It’s where I do my best thinking. In the middle of the afternoon, in the privacy of my office, I like to close my eyes for fifteen minutes. I allow my mind to slowly return to rest so as to awaken clearly once again. To not sleep at night is a kind of hell, tossing and turning on sweat-stained sheets, my partner silently suffering along side of me. Last night however she slept like a baby.

Listening to her breathing I lay on my back looking up at the ceiling. I thought about what I wanted to tell you this morning. I wanted to tell you about one of the small epiphanies I have had over the years we have known each other.

Maybe epiphany is too grandiose a term for something that results not in some major transformation but only confirms a subtle change of awareness or feeling. They mostly occur in the course of my travelling, moving from continent to continent and city to city. We set up a new home, make new friends, only to pull up stakes and move on a few years later. Lately, as I find myself travelling more and more, I cling ever more tenaciously to my latest adopted home here across the oceans. Somehow having this place to return to at the end of my journeys makes everything always possible.

As I was saying, I have these insights when I travel. They don’t suggest anything new but are a clear signpost of a personal transformation that has already occurred. Does that make sense to you? Have you had these kinds of moments?

Do you remember how many years ago it was that I moved to your country? I can’t count exactly but I do remember that in moving from Prairie summers to your mild subtropical winters everything was new again. It wasn’t always easy, but being in your country opened me out into the world around me. As a child, I mostly lived in my head, but the smell of your Eucalyptus trees somehow made a sensualist, even a hedonist, of me.

So every year or two I would return home. We’d fly out of the East for many hours only to land at the same time as we left. We’d usually travel around the world so as to experience as much as we could. Each time we’d need to travel to more and more places to say hello to people we met on previous journeys and still see places we hadn’t yet seen.

On one of these journeys, several years after I’d come to your country, we flew via a small group of islands in the middle of the ocean—a half-way point where we would change planes and continue to chase the sunrise. Into this airport at two in the morning, the plane disgorged its groggy passengers to await the next flight.

Some passengers went into the bar. I remember the television at the end of the counter was broadcasting a famous late night talk show I hadn’t seen in a few years. Some were playing cards in the transit lounge under fluorescent lights that were too bright for that small hour of the morning. I don’t know if it was rummy or whist or maybe even poker. I was listening to their voices, all flattened vowels yet with a strange lilting rhythm to their speech. I’ve always been bad at picking accents. I’m a poor mimic and until I get to know somebody it can be hard to guess where they’re from. These card players: I couldn’t figure out. I couldn’t pick their accents or anything about them. Nothing. It was as if I was looking at aliens.

My wife stared at me in disbelief. To her it was obvious who they were. Their clothes, their mannerisms, above all their accents told her everything. They were from precisely where I was from. It was at this moment I realized how at home I had become in your country. But there in the transit lounge in the middle of nowhere, I also understood how much I had to leave behind to get there.

When I woke up in the humid belly of the night, staring up at the ceiling, I thought of you. I was somewhere else and you were too. Me thinking of you reminded me of this story that happened so long ago, in the middle of another night, that I had already forgotten.