Daydreams
I’ve been daydreaming a lot more like I used to when I was a child.
My mother once described me as she saw in her minds eye. She said, it was like I was walking through a field of tall grass in a summer dress with a wide brimmed straw hat. And to my right was a lionness crouched and waiting, to my left a tangle of venomous snakes, their rattles shaking. In front loomed a cliff, obscured from view by the grass. But I was walking and dreaming, always unaware of the danger that surrounded me.
This to me was just a good description as any. She tried and tried (mostly succeeding) to make me more cognizant of my surroundings. But lately it seems like I’ve taken a step backwards into dreamland.
Someone recently walked by me on the street and just as he passed by me he said “marcia, pay attention.” I’d noticed him, his bulky figure ambling by, but it was enough to really pierce the veil of my conciousness, to pull me out of myself into recognition until he called my name. His words even startled me, icet water in the warm fog of my mind. I’ve tried to describe this sensation to others. I miss train stops, riding with my eyes open to a few stops beyond my destination or running onto uptown trains when I’ve road down a million times before. I’ve walks past my own street, past the same block I turn on everyday, only to find myself on bewildered on a slightly unfamiliar block. In a crowd my friends talk and their voices swirl around my head, a pleasant background to the noise of my thoughts. I have to remind myself always to be present, to look around to observe.
I’d hate to say I’m displeased with reality, but it can at times and in the nature of life be difficult, disappointing, confusing. Where sometimes my thoughts can grant me a certain control over a situation. The good can be better, even as sometimes the bad can be much worse. I wouldn’t recommend it as a way of life, it’s just hard to extract myself from the part of my thought process that engages in situations that can be very removed from reality. I work on it. I really have to try.
When I was younger I read fiction, usually that dealt in the realm of the fantastic. The heroes were usually strong but deeply flawed, at times villanous and sometime the monster, they usually never fail to disapoint at some crucial moment. But when the time came to be valliant, they stepped up to the plate. The heroines were often confused young women. They were the slight outcasts that you’d never expect to be as strong as thy could be, but of course always were. They never failed to grow, to gain a sense of themselves as the story progressed. And usually when it came time to make the hardest decision, to decide between what was desireable and what was necessary, they could always be counted on.
This of course was my favorite fantasy to live with, that people could do fail but ultimately they would rise to the challenge and face their mistakes head on. I daydreamed there so much that I began to write stories of my own. Mimickng the books I loved, I wasn’t only not present in life, I was busy creating an entirely different one, where every disappointment was merely a hurdle that everyone crossed to grow into something better.
The dormant hero within.
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