Dreamers
When I was in high school, I was always the quiet kid. It was not like I ever tried to correct my nonexistent relationship with other people anyway. Labels were flying from all over the classroom; one week I was the loner, next one I was ‘damaged’, after that I was retarded. It didn’t stop at only that, NO! Abused, emo, and the social invalid… I’ve been all of those and much more. Until one day when I became the kid at who’s story everyone would go aww. All of a sudden I had all these friends and acquaintances that wanted to be the hero that would get me out of the ‘the big black pit that was my life’ or whatever silly idea they had in mind. I’m pretty sure that the two girls I dated in high school went out with me simply because they thought they would be the one person I could count on should I ever feel depressed. While letting them believe what they wanted to, I still knew I could never be utterly and truly depressed about my life. No, I had too many bright colors in my mind that scattered all the grey stuff away and shielded me from harm. Sad and disappointed on the other hand, those moods did happen every now and then. People never stopped believing I needed help and could not stop fabricating new memories I never knew happened.
The first real story I have ever wrote was named “Dreamer” and it was about my life, from the first moment I could remember, all the way to the moment I was standing in front of them, reading my work. It explained in detail what happened and my thoughts about their speculations, and it was the only time people actually stared at me blankly. Without a single word, I excused myself from the classroom and went to get some pizza. No one tried to stop me, and for that I was grateful. After telling them everything, I was in an unexplainably good mood for weeks. Not even one person asked me why did I tell them everything, and not even a soul that heard that story ever talked to me again; except for the teachers of course. It wasn’t until 2 years later that I met other people who could understand, people like me.
I made my first friends in my senior year, five of them, and in those days we were dreamers. We wrote our little hearts out whenever we could and we forgot reality, if only for a bit, every single time we picked up our pens and strode down the street of creation. My one person imaginary kingdom became our dream, and we worked long and hard on creating a world of our own. We built a world in our ‘writing room’ as we called it, and raised great translucent walls all around our new fiefdom. People passed through it without even knowing it, they didn’t believe in it like we did after all. Visitors came one by one and one after the other, some temporary some eternal. We asked no toll for passage and we didn’t care about the length of their stay. Our dreamland was supposed to be the first novel that had so many writers contributed to its contents, but alas we never got to finish it; the reason for our halt is a story for another time however.
This morning, while going through some old notebooks, I found the most inspirational quote from our novel. I cried for almost an hour, and that’s a lot considering how rarely I do so. It was not originally written in English, so I will share the rough translation with you guys, I hope you find the words as heartwarming as I did.
“The boy still waited on them, neither west nor east, but somewhere in between where the Sun and Moon were never born and couldn't die. Where gravity held no power and reason had no meaning, where colors were endless. He stood there with his gaze pointed at everything and nothing in particular, his hand reaching out towards the faces in the mist; awaiting response…”
This was just a bunch of random memories that hit me after reading this, so I’m sorry if their order or context makes little sense. We still dream from time to time, but only in quintets and we never make any progress in our work. When we started writing, we believed everything needed to be complete in order to be truly beautiful, but now, in the words of my best friend: “We had no more to add and no more to take away, in our hearts incomplete had become perfect”. |