Mood: You have an old dvd somewhere – you’re sure you do. So you spend the entire day cleaning your dvd collection to find it (it was in the wrong case) (you have a large dvd collection). It’s a movie you loved back in the day, but you loved the DVD most because it had the director’s cut and deleted scenes and everything. You make yourself a good meal and pop it into the player. It plays the first three seconds of the movie and freezes. You take it out wipe it and play it again. Still doesn’t work. So now you have all this evening left.
Any fool who knows that killing a dream is a delicate affair – and horribly violent. So there are two options:
- Don’t kill your dream.
- If you must kill your dream, make sure it dies.
Burying dreams under the fence behind the shop has never been a good idea. Once you’ve waited for the neighbour’s children discovering that their privates can actually be semi public, you’ll have to deal with simba. Still, even if you wait out teen lust and a barkless bite, you still won’t be done with the dream forever.
You might try and forget about it, but as long as the dream remains buried you will have a path out of the omelas. And as long as you have a way out you will never be able to settle in – because you never wanted to be there in the first place.
And you know this.
You know this because you buried your fucking dream. Now, like a hearbeat in quantam entanglement with your own, it beats.
*******
Do teenage dreams rebel?
(I write dreams but I am actually asking about dreams)
Does a dream, on achieving a loose grasp of the mechanisms that affect its survival, decide that it can navigate on its own?
Have you seen dreams wandering the streets, culture shocked and hungry? What does a fully grown dream look like?
*****
Perhaps, she said, the problem is not that there is a problem but there’s the lingering persistence of a problem that once was. You were not okay, but now you are but because you are used to not being okay you navigate the world like you’re not okay but you are – but because of how you navigate it confirms your truth which is that you are not okay. Which is okay, except it’s not.
That’s how she said it too – and with as little punctuation.
By the time you were piecing it together you had already taken advice from every fool.
And there’s very little ways to be okay (or not) when two wounded hearts are pounding blood through your ears.
*****
You remember when their parents started complaining. They had heard whispers of an alley in the neighbourhood where the teens went when they wanted to understand each other better. It was not going to last that long anyway. It’s hard for an ambiguous group of teens to keep a secret. And besides, everyone could smell what they were smoking – so it was silly both ways.
“You’ve not been hanging out behind that shop have you?”
Some questions are like riddles with their answers not being in the answer themselves but in how one formulates their answer. You answered wrong – but you only knew about it because you had researched extensively before you buried your dream. Not that you had no interest in the other activities but there were more discreet ways to find out. Or that’s what you told yourself.
But it did make for an excellent hiding point. Two points of entry, so options if cornered. A lot of undergrowth, which meant healthy enough ground. And a sewer right round the bend. This was important because adults are a lot less likely to be found around dirt than children. And, if one must bury a dream, it is best to do so away from an adult.
But you only remember them as complaining.
So you’re not necessarily shocked that they took down the shop – but it does bother you. Especially now as you stand there looking at the shiny new house that stands where the shop once stood. Off to its left a beautiful garden blocks of what use to be the entrance to the alley.
Only a child could think a shop can last forever – even landscapes are transient.
*****
Years later a child finds a strange object buried in the garden.
They feel a heartbeat linger.