Dreams

I look around me here in my own personal library and I think of all the words in here. Books written by souls like mine; souls that want to write, to share, to encourage, inspire, create. I was driven to write from a young age. When I graduated high school my goal was to move to Colorado and write poetry. I did not want a job or a career. The only thing I wanted was writing, Colorado and happiness. Needless to say, all these years later, here I am at my computer, typing my thoughts and feelings, trying to come closer to being a paid writer. I don't need to make a living at it, although it would be nice. Just to be paid something might be nice. But I don't write for pay. I write for my heart, for my soul. I write, like last night, for my sanity. There have been long patches in my life where I did not write anything; a journal, poetry. Nothing. The happy years, I guess you could say. But those are the years I would have been able to maybe take the time to produce, to polish, to send off. I spent them being a wife. Being a homemaker, working jobs I had no passion for; just a job to make money. Now I know I have passion for my job and money to pay my own bills, but I am not in my "happy" years. Not to say I am unhappy; I am not. But I am not in the lap of luxury, I am not safe in the knowledge that my heart loves another and that is my be-all-end-all.

I am not living my dream of being a published author. I did not feel the urge to write in those years; I basically put my dreams on hold. First, because my parents said I had to. To them, college was the only option. I have never regretted that, although it ended up taking me a lot longer than I ever dreamed to finally get a Masters Degree. I don't regret the college years, and I am very grateful to them for the life path they sent me on. But, there are lots of side tracks in the road to life. Lots of diversions in those "happy" years. I don't regret much in life, and I don't regret those years. I don't regret putting every bit of me into my marriage, into my life with Steve. I was mostly happy and I think that I could have stayed in that marriage forever, just making it through life entangled lives always together. But it was not to be, and reflecting back I can see that I was not always happy; it was not a blissful time. There was a lot I gave up to be who I was then. My writing dream. A life different than the one I had - that Colorado dream. I can't express the love. We had love. A lot of it. We had respect, and fun, and caring and consideration. Until we didn't. I can look back and see the imperfections in myself. I can see them in Steve and in our life, too, but I can see them in me. I can remember the days I would be cleaning or cooking and working really hard to just exist; and I can remember crying, longing, desiring some other life and just not sure what that looked like. I remember knowing I settled when I settled into life with Steve; that I put my own dreams and heart aside to be joined forever. I can see his flaws, although I am not here to pick them apart; that is not what this is about. It is about how easy it easy to give away your dreams so carelessly.

I still go back to my thoughts about alternative world; parallel universes; how I wonder if they exist, and how comforting it is to believe that they do. That somewhere in time along another plane, the me that I really wanted, the poet with the Rocky Mountain High - I hope she is happy pursuing her dream; that somewhere she is poet laureate to the world; the Robert Frost of her time. I hope that she is living a Bohemian life style, un-tethered to any one soul, answering only to the call of her heart. That she dresses in flowing linen and gauze and she wears beautiful clanking bracelets given to her by a lover madly desiring her. I hope she dances naked in the moonlight under the stars and that she washes her face in mountain streams when the mood strikes. I hope she paints color portraits of her world with her words - and maybe, also in oil paints on canvas too. I hope somewhere sometime she and I can meet, share notes and discover that we wanted what the other has. I hope, that in my parallel universe, somewhere, one of me did achieve the dreams we wanted for ourselves.