Languishing Dreams
When I was a kid I got lost at the store.
Parents in a tizzy, nowhere to be found.
Until a stranger marched me to the frontlines.
Hugs and smiles exchanged.
“Thank heaven we found you.”
Pretty cliché right?
Yet today I’m in that same store.
And I’m still lost.
An eery reflection in the glass door of the frozen dinners.
But this time I know where my parents are.
It’s me, who I can’t find.
Life has been an endless sequence of dreaming.
I lay my head down at night lost in the dreams of,
who I wish was next to me,
of,
how I wish today could have been different.
Until I slip into oblivion; only more dreaming.
This kind I like.
My conscious unchained and unruly,
Roaming the vast expanses of an infinite landscape.
Hiding from the lurking monsters.
Upon morning light I rise with the yellowing sun,
My mind already slipping away from a day that’s still undone.
The wishes of my childhood are nowhere to be found.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
A question that tortures the highly motivated - yet talentless.
And here I’ve found community.
Action, but no forward motion,
Coated in sweat from running in place.
Falsely calling it exercise.
Or even worse,
Living.
Progress.
Barely creating a breeze a gnat could surf upon.
As if I looked so deep inside myself,
that I got lost.
Meandering to the very bottom, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not.
Only to look up and realize I was trapped.
Not because it was too deep, but because I was too tired.
It was too far for the climb to be worth it.
And so on I go in life, drowning in my own awakeness.
The air thinning.
Dreaming that if everything around me was a bit different.
That if I only I had been luckier,
More attractive,
More self control.
Just better.
That I could have had a happy life.
Dreaming of the days now past,
when dreams were gifts happily received.
Before they became the extra pounds you just couldn’t shake.
I’ve learned that dreaming without action is,
the only habit I cannot break.
Like a frog jumping upon the lilies,
Leaping back and forth avoiding at all costs to get wet,
Over the water that it desperately needs.
Having forgotten it was born to swim.
Eventually a cold splash in the face will finally wake me.
But I am surrounded by those with big mouths and little courage.
Urging me to stay put.
To live content with filth,
arguing that at least it isn’t grime.
And although intrinsically I know they’re wrong,
it becomes foolish to argue with repeating patterns.
And so thus I sojourn.
Dreams unending with glimpses of life in between.
Too blind to drive but the lenses are cracked.
So I must see the world in the only way it is clear,
As cracked as I am.
A walking casket, brimming with the bones and blood,
of my soul that has fallen off on the journey.
Picking each piece as it had fallen,
hoping, even dreaming,
to find someone, something, or somewhere I can put me all back together again.
To be whole.
Oh what a dream.