First Freewrite - Life's Changes and Purple Squirrels

There was something about that purple squirrel that made him think that maybe he needed to be sleeping more. Over the last two months, big changes had come into his life, one of which was that sleep had gone out the window.

He had quit smoking, everyone was happy about that, especially his wife. After the first week, which he spent hidden inside the farmhouse playing offline steam games, he had immerged a new man, a changed man.

How deep those changes had been, he was still not entirely sure. He was still getting used to the newness of himself. For years he had fallen asleep, exhausted after a long day, but it seems as if the exhaustion was more from the cigarettes than the day, for now he had trouble sleeping more than four or five hours a night.

_{Focus fades but he's still awake
Photo by: Ledis Arango V.}

But that was not the only change. His entire life seemed to have turned on a hinge around the time that he had overcome the addiction. Things he had been praying for for years quickly fell into place and his whole life upended and shunted him into a new dimension.

An emergency phone call started it all. He was needed, urgently. Well, what was new? It was not everyday, but certainly every week that someone locally urgently needed him to volunteer his time to their project, which often resulted in sitting around, drinking coffee and discussing said potential project. As he always did, he analyzed the new offer of free work through the perspective of how much good it could do for the sustainable development of his adopted community, Líbano. And this time, it seemed like pretty good odds.

He agreed to meet on Monday and on that Monday chuckled to himself as he was considered ‘late’. ‘How can I be considered late for something I haven’t agreed to nor has even been explained to me?’. Colombians are beautiful, funny, lively, innovative and interesting people, and they always kept him on his toes.

But late he was, some foreigners were already on the road with the local guides, and one of them did not speak spanish. He was needed for simultaneous translation. It was a difficult task, one that he was always trying to improve at. His bilingual brain seemed like a transmission box, and he was still learning to rapidly switch between them without grinding the gears.

_{This is your brain on bilingualism}
Source

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This is as far as I could get in 5 minutes, but it did allow me to start breaking the ice on something I have been thinking about writing for awhile now, classified in my head as Life’s Hard Forks.

Thanks to @mariannewest for her constant encouragement and witty comments - a friend from before Papa Pepper’s selfie contest - but now I’m getting to know her really well - from all angles - even standing on one leg!

Love and Light!