She awoke in the morning with the vague feeling of adventure and heartache. She rolled onto her stomach and breathed in heavily, digging the heels of her hands into her eyes and subsequently letting them slide through her hair. It was a clumsy attempt to remove it from her face, but her fingers caught in the tangles and she brushed it aside as the beginnings of one large dread. She slid her bare feet over the edge of her bed, and their impact with the cold hard floor brought her mostly back to life. She plodded off to the shower, robe in hand.
The water ran over her shoulders and it wasn’t until it started to turn icy that she realized how long she’d been standing there. Something felt thick around her. She felt as though there was a heavy fog in her mind. She thought hard. There was something on the edge of her memory.
She slipped her purple sweater over her shoulders and as she began to slide the last button into place at her neck, she looked at its reflection in the mirror. She stopped and stared at it. Something was just barely eluding her. She rolled the button between her fingers for a moment, trying to make the fog lift. There was something she had dreamed. Something that she didn’t want to forget.
She took her toast out of the toaster, buttered it, set it on the table, took a mug from the cupboard , poured herself coffee, began to spoon in sugar—a flash—she set the mug down abruptly. It spilled light brown on the kitchen counter. She was sure of it. There was something she had forgotten. She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes and thought hard. Fleeting memories left their quick impressions upon her mind, but she couldn’t grasp it: not anything concrete.
She spent a moment staring at the jar of sugar then drank her coffee and ate her toast quickly before climbing in her car to drive to work. She stayed in the office from eight to five and then went home. She fed her dog. She made dinner. She went for a walk. That week she got promoted. The next month she bought a house. The next year she completed her garden. She worked and cooked and gardened and walked her dog and she forgot. She forgot that there was a time in which she had a dream.
*
She had dreamed one night that she had not put work first. That she had not gone straight home every evening. She dreamed that she had indulged in life and bought into its loveliness. That she never got promoted or bought a house. She dreamed that her heart and door were always open and that she had laughed at the consequences. That a shiny piece of jewelry had been placed on her left hand.
She dreamed that she had not lived life alone.
And as the early morning beams had wrapped themselves around her and began to pull her back to reality, she clung to her dream. She clung to the memories of laughter ringing across a lake, burning dinners, and late bills. She basked in the glory of inside jokes, themed gifts, and discrete communication. She seared into her memory what it was like to never laugh or scream alone, to have a human being as your right arm, to be one flesh.
They both knew she was slipping away and they both knew their glory days were coming to an end, and as the memories of a life lived began to blur into early morning light, she held onto him and told herself: “Don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget. It was all worth remembering. Don’t forget! Don’t forget there was something worth remembering!”
*
She awoke in the morning with the vague feeling of adventure and heartache. But there is a reason ideals are called dreams, and life, reality.
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