Title.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Has anyone read this poem? I had to. For school. Five years ago. I was... Fifteen. I was fifteen five years ago. It's been five years. I'm twenty. And adult. I'm twenty and technically an adult though I won't feel that's true until I'm providing for myself and living apart from my parents I guess. I suppose we all have a metric. For success and what we think will make us feel happy and satisfied and fulfilled in life.

When I was young, I thought adoration and validation, love and affection would do it. A hero or saviour type to stitch me back together. Someone to wipe away the things I felt were broken. People came. Put more cracks in my foundation without a care in the world. The kinder ones didn't rebuild a thing. I walked beside them a while and pushed them away when it got too much.

For better or worse... I'm here. Alive. Every dream I have seems to get wrecked rather quickly and easily. I don't know where they went. There's probably a land of broken dreams in my brain. Some cavern. Bottomless and yet, you can tell what's down there is grey. Devoid of light. No soul left. Above it all, this pit of nothingness are little white glow bugs that flit around.

Hope.

Not because I want it there but because my younger self needed it to survive at times and so do I. My dreams had nowhere to go but farther into me when I gave them up, piece by piece. The dream that my father could love me the way I wanted him to when truly, he's the man he is and has been himself for sixty years, more to come. We all choose our change. The ones we decide we need to make, the ones we actually do make. And sometimes they help. And sometimes they don't.

Dreams are nice and all but I'm more accustomed to nightmares. They feel more likely. More real because they hurt and the pain feels so much more tangible when it's felt. To me. I lean into the hard things cos prettier things feel more fleeting.

Everything is choice. I didn't get it when I was young. Part of me still doesn't. I thought I was stuck. I thought I had to listen to every word my parents said, even when I was told that the god we were meant to serve sent people like me to hell for loving different. I felt that if I followed the world enough and fit in enough, I would be safe and so... Why not hate my fatness and my social aversion and my "strange" interests and about everything about me? Why not decide my body and mind simply weren't correct?

That my dreams weren't correct?

It takes a lot to change a misconception you've held since childhood. And remember, everything is both true and false. Everything can be believed and disbelieved. Proven and disproven as long as that's what a person wants. It's all perspective. Every last piece of this world is built on choice. Some people chose wars and the power of fancy coloured paper and religious beliefs and discrimination... People followed along, as we so often do. Because sometime it seems easier to just bow your head. Most times. But there is always. Always. A cost.

I dunno. I felt like a weak person a very long time. A coward. A puppet. I used to write stuff like that in the back of my notebooks. I remember what was my first class studying law because my father picked it for me. Laughing and crying at the back of the class, head buried in my arms, hoping no one could tell I was going mad, trying to understand why I couldn't simply control myself.

If you leave a dream to die, it doesn't matter whether it shrivels or festers, shrinks or runs. It doesn't matter if it explodes. The residue will remain. The shrapnel will piece at your skin and your mind and your heart, whether you want it to or not. Scars will be left as reminders of the betrayal of the self. And you get to choose every day to let more go or not.

Dreams are an inextricable piece of being alive. Where one dies, another often follows, no matter how long it takes. Many have too many to know what to do with. I dream of a version of existence where I feel safe and confident and at peace with my choices. With myself. A place where I have come to a state of utter self-acceptance. A place where I let go of the world and cling to myself. To my hopes - the idiotic visions of better that kept me alive all my life.

I will be a dreamer till the day I die. I'm almost certain of it. I do it every time I plunge into yet another world of fiction. I do it every time things get too hard in this reality of ours. It's so much prettier in worlds you have control over. The ones you can traverse freely. Some day, I'll realise - truly realise - that this reality I am in is already mine to shape to my wishes. One day I'll realise my dream is my own and an easy one to reach at that. One day, I will let go of the "them" and plunge into the "I" like the hopeful, idiotic Icarus I am.

I don't expect eternal happiness. I don't think it's possible to be fully satisfied forever. But what would life be without that little, annoying prick of hope for those prettier, fleeting moments?

I'd rather live and die a crazy fool. Things would be much more drab and boring otherwise. I wish for better chapters in my stories and a happier ending than the Nightmare King in my thoughts expects.

I dream and so, I live.