Dream

"Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?"
Tupac Shakur

~

The house is small. And it is made of wood; light brown exterior, reddish maroon interior. It has one door, three windows and a backdoor on the left side. It's a one-room-house in the middle of nowhere. Inside, the four walls are stacked with thousands of photographs, all staring at a single bed at the center.

I built this house when I was a child. I built it with early traumas and wet pillow covers. I built it with broken toys and fits of rage. I built it with yellow bedsheets and humiliation. I built it all by myself and wrote betrayal on the welcome mat. I'd been sleeping there every night for as far as I can remember. The few cracks in the ceiling even found a way to map themselves as wrinkles on my face. Perhaps it was their way of reminding me that no matter how badly my memory attempts to self-destruct, the pain of the past will always be etched in the mirror.

That house right there is the reason why I've always been homesick, why I could never belong. The world's beautiful lights could not compare with the dark grey brightness my eyes were accustomed to. And all those seductive perfumes people wore smelled nothing like the stagnant shame and regret entrenched in my lovely rotting mattress.

No one's ever set foot near this place. But love has a way of clawing at your insecurities, of tearing all the metaphors you hide behind back to reality's page. So here I am now haunting with words the haunted house that's sheltered me for years. The walls of sanity have been breached. Anxiety has hit like a storm. The windows have shattered into stubborn tears and the ceiling has finally crumbled onto all those past selves I can barely remember.

The door is still there though. And it opens with a single word. We can go inside and I could show you some things you don't know about me. But now is not the time.

Now is the time to wander off this barren land, past the broken house and the plastic castle on its left side, past the friendly void and its endless patterns in the concrete, past the rose and into the next adventure.

So, tonight, I'll get to sleep outside for the first time. I'll sleep in the bed we built together with love. And I'll look at all the stars I named after you and dream with misty eyes. I'll dream of the fireworks in your skin. I'll dream of the magic that pervades your blinks. I'll dream of you, of the younger you, of the older you. I'll dream of you, all of you.

And, maybe, tonight, we'll meet in the same dream – and we'll greet each other with that I-love-you-smile we're both really good at. Yeah... that one.

I guess we've already met in the same dream.

~

"Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?”
Edgar Allan Poe