I spend so much of my time looking for that one thing. It’s almost completely undefinable and oftentimes it is mistook for something that feels like it. I watch as other brains don’t look for this one thing and wander if the pain I recognize is part of my life, part of my history, and causes me to search beyond the normal parameters.

I hope that we all have that one thing that isn’t easily attained but allows us to keep working for the nebulous dream sitting on our horizon. I hope we all dream beautiful and elegant worlds to find solace in. I hope we all can close our eyes and imagine those musicians are speaking to us. I hope in all the misery that is prevalent in my world I can still find a sky painted by the brush of my own soul.

Dreams are supposed to be difficult to obtain. And the longer it takes to obtain them the more they change. What is once a child-like fairy tale becomes a grown-up version of a Nicholas Sparks novel. What once took away the monsters now takes away the light. What once comfort us in our loneliness finds us instead in our greatest darkness.

I have been alone; I have been lonely. I have felt the desertion of all that I once believed to be important. In many ways it was part of my own journey from childhood to being a grown up to learn that the simple breakdown of what we are is often as normal as the presence of our childhood that won’t leave. We walk in misery, we walk in fear, and we walk with the knowledge that they can’t understand.

The nebulous who is completely dependent on your own nightmares. They are not driven by the black and white realities that I struggle with but by the multi-color platforms that grow each time the dream is felt and lost. They are only there for our own choosing; but make no mistake they are not there to hold our hands. Those who can’t understand will always sit on the sidelines of our lives and disdain what they can’t have. Those who can’t understand will always block us from the need we are losing.

The hardest part is that you need this dream; I need this dream. We can’t function without some knowledge that who and what we are is not only understood by someone, but even more accepted by someone. This is our Excalibur, this is our key to what will one day be the freedom so many before us has promised. This is the dream that makes us more lonely than alone. This is the dream that destroys the hope we need to allow the angels to slip past us to find what we can’t see.

I have held and I have been held. I have been rocked to sleep by the most loyal hands I will ever know. I have felt the hand of God raise my chin up right before he sent me on the greatest battle I will ever know. And this night I can hear the screams every time the reality proves again not to be the dream. I can hear the dust sweeping by me and yet there is no where for me to go.

The indescribable hope that there is someone out there who gets it or who understands us at the core must be so complicated as to be rarely felt. Is it lost because the journey is so complicated or is it lost because we are? Is the truth of who and what we are so hard to carry that we have been left to swim in the red of our veins? Have we lost our hope because it was never there to begin with?

I can feel the steps of my dream. I can feel the details slowly collecting around me, the details only the broken parts of me can see. My body curls into itself every time that dream presents itself in my mind as a reality. Because my body knows what my mind can’t accept; there is no dream and there is no place to find it. There is an emptiness of reality that can’t be shaken even by nature’s incredible parallels.  Did we know this at the beginning?

I need to see the temper; the holy fury of a lost dream. There should be some sort of incredible display of our childhood’s destruction or lost hope that can only be found in the minds of the greatest storms that have ever lived. If it is an earthquake, let them take down the pillars of what I once hoped. If it is hurricane, let them sweep through and finally clean the hollow shell that I am.

Because I can’t live with the knowledge that the dream I once had is not only gone but instead can’t be found. I can’t deal with the knowledge that this world has brought me down to my knees and then taken the one thing I always held; the dream. It is hard for me to maintain my silence in the shock of my nerves. Where are those steps that I could feel? Where is the dream they once promised? Where is that hope that others can find so easily but alludes me at every turn? Where is that final moment when it is all over and who will rise from the ashes of the fire?

I keep hoping that everyone I am fighting for and every thing I am fighting against will one day get easier; if for no other reason except I would love to argue that it is my turn. I want the sweeping violins in the first stanzas of that iconic song ‘At Last’ to allow me to walk down the aisle, not to someone else’s dream but my own. I keep hoping that one day those arms will close around me and I won’t be as lost as I am in this moment. I keep hoping that there will be a savior strong enough to understand that I am so weak and would be willing to carry me anyway.

To the world I will continue to fight. To the world I will be the perfect portrait of what they need me to be. But in my dreams, I will continue to die. When I close my eyes each night I will try to desperately hold onto a dream that disappears before the first ray of morning. I will breathe through the knowledge that the pain I feel is as grotesque to some as it is beautiful to me. And I will continue to take my pathetic revenge each and every time I can.

Despite the possibility of beautiful dreams this world has made me sharper. It has taken me down to the literal emotional core and drew the greatest fears I never admitted to. This world has taken the good and turned it into a vengeful and ugly woman that I am today. This world has taken my heart, my forgiveness, my new starts, my tides and mountains, and left me with the almost desperate evil that once woke me screaming.

I have been carved out of my life. I have been eaten down until it becomes an issue to hide my hatred and even my fear. I have taken the abuse for so long the dream has given up on me. I may be looking at it but the true dream has fled some time ago. And I have been left with these pieces and these memories. And left to find a new dream in the rubble without the comfort of possibility.