Childish Dreams

Illustration by Samuel King

When it's over, I don't want to wonder 

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, 

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

—Mary Oliver

On a hot summer night, I jolted awake from a vivid dream, gasping. In the dream I was flying, recklessly high and weightless, cutting through the clean air. It was thrilling – a world of possibilities glistening, a lawless freedom. But I was terrified, frozen by a paralyzing fear, one that swallows you. Scared I might fly too close to the sun, might be stripped of my fleeting abilities and plummet to the hard reality waiting below. I was flying – a spectacular miracle embodied – and yet I didn’t care. I needed desperately to get back to where everything was real and decided, certain and safe. There weren’t enough roads in the clouds. I awoke relieved to touch solid Earth, to be once again bound to the concrete by gravity’s contract. It took me only a few moments to realize I had abandoned my wings for comfort, rejected the joyful unknown to pledge allegiance to cowardice, traded boundless potential for docile actuality. I felt regret and closed my eyes, squeezing tight and waiting to lift off the ground once again. I was ready to be back amongst the howling winds, with the sun on my back and the ground below, only this time determined to grasp every sliver of the wonderful risk, to navigate the brilliant terror with clear eyes and courage. Yet when I drifted back to sleep, I dreamt of grocery shopping and deadlines. The next night was dreamless, and the one after that too. I don’t dream about flying anymore. 

I feel trapped between a rock and a hard place, between desire and time, which just keeps passing. I want to be always present, to taste every drop of laughter, to smell the rain as it blankets the asphalt. But I am afraid to stop moving, afraid to stop thinking and just be here. Afraid that I might become too captivated by my greed to consume the cheap pleasures of one moment and fail to notice the future slipping away, passing me by, beyond rescue. It’s an ugly bargain, auctioning off unfiltered experience in packages, to be rationed and stored away for later use. I trade and barter, partitioning myself across time and space, and the seconds die off all the same. Days turn to weeks, weeks to months, and the beast of time rears its grotesque head again, reminding me it cannot be killed or ignored. 

Spurred by ancient guilt and coerced by dread, I feel I must contextualize my happiness, temper my joy, restrain my ambition. I feel compelled to imprison them, hidden from the sun in a hole beneath the ground, bathed in darkness and resignation – a lifeless corpse. I stand before a jury of my fears, a shadow on trial, always guilty. I know this is wrong. It is shamefully ungrateful to the universes of wonder that lie within each moment,  to hold myself hostage at the mercy of what comes before and after. Each parcel of existence, each organ of the earth, unburdened and untethered, waits to be experienced wholly. Life demands attention. The faint stars float aimlessly, deaf to the hum of traffic – I should follow suit. This is how we can live. This is how we die having done more than merely visited this world. Live and breathe each second with the blank clarity of a newborn; devour passing seconds like a starved prisoner, with the wonder of an alien creature discovering every corner of this grand earthly life for the very first time. Be naive. Be curious. Bathe in awe and devastation. Carry the immeasurable weight of experience like a badge of honour, anchoring you to the only reality you’ll ever know, and never let it go until your dying breath. Melt into your convictions, wield sadness like a sword, and study your sorrows with a magnifying glass of ambition. Discover something worthwhile within every shattered fragment of infinity. Do you feel free and shapeless? Could you slip between the cracks? 

Often, I feel myself wandering aimlessly, somewhere in the barren no man's land between complacency and action. I want to do, and yet I don’t. I want to be, and yet I’m not. I exist and I decay in the liminal space between realities, incapable of choosing path and following it with resolution, instead obsessed with the infinity of other realities I must forgo in the total pursuit of one. I cannot disentangle the knotted ball of possibilities, and so, unable separate what is from what could be, nothing happens and yet everything could. So I look around hopefully across the deserted stretch of my own choices, looking to the sky and the ground and the faces of my mother and father, waiting for someone or something that isn’t me to make the decisions that I know only I can make – waiting for a bus that will never arrive, a saviour that won’t ever come, a voice of absolute certainty to echo over the hills and guide me to safety. But this voice doesn’t exist, because the answers don’t either. I know this, and yet I wait, straining my ear and squinting my eyes, kicking up dirt and counting the stars, until everything around me fades into nothing at all. 

What does failure feel like? Some might say it feels suffocating, like hands on your throat, a foot on your neck. Maybe at first. But I think it lingers, like smoke in your lungs, like dirt in your eye that you can’t quite blink away. You taste it with every breath. It clouds and corrupts your vision no matter where you look. But what is it really that scares us about failure? Why do we want to burn the evidence that we tried, hide the proof that we lived the real thing? Regret is a phony dictator. It rules through the promise of painful retribution, but requires self-imposed punishment – its legitimacy is derived from the willingness of its subjects to surrender themselvesto tyranny. For a long time I have given myself to the handcuffs of apprehension, thinking Icould appease my captors. It hasn’t worked. Tomorrow, I’ll try to remember every shade of blue that paints the sky. And maybe tonight, I’ll dream of flying.