Take Your Time

Dear friend, 

    As I was lying down on a fairly comfortable chair in one of the operating rooms at the office of my dentist, I closed my eyes and dreamt of you. I imagined holding your hand as we laid our backs down against the soft green grass, our faces partially covered by the leaves of a nearby tree. 

   Your touch against mine, I was inseparable from you. Perhaps it was only a bodily reaction to the amount of pressure pushing down on my teeth as the pain was numbed by a dose of anesthesia, reality numbed by fantasy. 

     I know you don't think of me often but the paper keeps calling me to write. And not just any short story or poem but a letter to you; one that I will never send and you will never read. 

   The pain of unrequited love is lessened when it is poured onto a blank canvas, even if the intended audience will never once lay their eyes upon the pictures and the words that come from the pictures. These sentences make sense of the dreams that I have no plausible explanation for having. 

    I know well my intentions and goals but my emotions are a different beast. 

   At times they are light and easy to carry, I write out of habit and leisure for my own personal pleasure.      But when they grow impossibly heavy and so large that they spill in between the spaces of my fingers and onto an empty page, I write to survive. 

  For I know well enough the power that feelings and emotions can have on one's conscience. So I apologize if these impassioned words fail to strike a chord but I thank you for listening anyways; even if you have nothing to say in reply. 

    I write this to you because dreams above all things, can be confusing. 

  I remember one instance a few years ago in which my friends and I attempted to see who could successfully lucid dream first. 

   So we laid on living room floor packed like sardines and closed our eyes, and after half an hour someone with a single eye opened whispered, "Yo..are you guys doing it?" 

  We burst into laughter and never tried to lucid dream altogether again. 

  That event reminds me of the fact that dreams have a life of their own, they come when it is their time to pass by and remain for a little while. In dreams, I find an escape route to a world where my deepest desires and longings manifest themselves in the form of our clasped hands and a breeze that rolls over our t-shirts creating ripples, making the fabric dance in delight. 

 Our dreams are born from our emotions and they feed off of them without once caring about our intentions, rarely do emotions and intentions go hand in hand. 

  But perhaps where reality lacks, dreams make up for tenfold. 

  I read somewhere that when a person appears in your dreams, it means that they are dreaming of you also. Several of my friends have also been experiencing vivid dreams so maybe we all aren't that different from each other. 

 We all live in the same physical world but we also each have our own unique world that exists in our dreams. 

  How beautiful is that? 

  I wonder who else dreams of you because it's not often that you appear in mine. 

 Yet because you did today, I am writing this letter to preserve that scene of us amidst the green and below the blue; our eyes closed as your hand rests in mine, flooding warmth easing us into slumber. 

Rest well, 

Beatrice Kristi, Dance With Me, 2018