That nightmare always made me sick, angry and terrified. Despite my earlier resolutions I didn’t know what to do with myself, or how to ease the pain. I took my giant coffee mug with me to the desk, and an ashtray. I knew it wasn’t a good idea, but at that moment I didn’t care. I turned my computer on, open the files I needed and went back to my translation. If I couldn’t sleep, I might as well work...

They had the decency to wait for the afternoon before they called me again, and found me barely awake after a nap supposed to catch up on all the lost hours of sleep of these last weeks.

“M! We finished the script!” said Abby. She was very excited and so energetic that I could feel the beginning of a headache creeping up, even through a screen. “All we need now is a filming team, rats, money, filming locations… Just a few details! Would you agree to help us? You could perhaps do the organizing? We’ll take care of everything else! It’s gonna be so awesome, I just can’t wait to start! I’m already sewing my costume and…”

I couldn’t hear the rest, having my head buried in my hands. I let out a moan. What had I gotten myself into? I didn’t have the money or the contacts, nor the energy, really… And even less of an idea of what exactly was expected of me.

Pierre was a less energetic fellow. He had a low, soothing voice that helped a lot with my fast-evolving headache.

“Abby, calm down. Poor girl didn’t catch more than 4 hours of sleep per night in the last month, she can’t keep up! Sorry M., she’s an electric cell right now. What we’re trying to say is that, we put a feasible scenario together, and we need your help again. Not much, really. None of us has organisation skills, and we know that organising stuff used to be your job, so we thought that you were the best possible choice for this part of the plan.”

I still didn't get it. Why weren’t they being more specific? What exactly did they want me to do? Dang, I was going to need another coffee if I wanted to continue this conversation. I looked at my mug: empty. I grabbed a smoke, hoping it would be enough for the time being.

“Slow down guys. You still haven’t explained what you wanted. I can’t organise things that don’t exist. We don’t have anything except words on a piece of paper yet. We need goals. We need research. We can’t improvise ourselves movie producers, we don’t have the background or the formation or anything. We could use help from a professional, if we could only find one. Pierre, you work in the film industry, do you have any contacts there? Abby, we’re going to need actors, do you know anybody that might be interested?”

Unbelievably, we spent the next two hours trying to figure out what our next moves would have to be, writing a to-do list of actions for each of us. We split the work according to our individual skills and tried calling people that we thought might be willing to help us. Of course, we had a lot of negative answers. But Abby offered to call our therapist to tell her about this whole crazy thing.

The doctor, who had seen it coming, proposed to meet with her and some of her other patients that might be interested in the movie. They were from all sorts of professional backgrounds and all ages and genders, but all of them had one thing in common with us : they wanted to heal and help heal.

We agreed to the meeting, scheduled it for two weeks later, and got back to work. We had 14 days to learn how the film industry worked, how to produce a movie, how to direct actors. 14 days to come up with a solid plan and to find locations, equipment, and costumes. There was no way we could manage to do this. But we didn’t know that. Oh, and I was out of coffee.