All the pieces of who I am, an at times unharmonious symbiosis of nostalgic ache that undulates into caverns of my beings I didn’t know flowed so deeply and frictioned forward motion towards dreams that feel like looming emerald towers. The way forward feels like a slog, an untiring march through knee high waters in a bog land that shades the sun. I am sustained like a dense forest plant, spending my days in search of sparing dappled light.

Sometimes, in uninspiring stretches of monotonous scenery, I watch the herons overhead as they circumvent this bog entirely. Reaching the oasis in the distance I aim towards against inertia with a grace and adeptness I can only manifest in envy. Why, I wonder, is the road I’m traveling so much more winding? Perhaps I am not clever enough to have found an easier way. And maybe I even like the toil. In the shadowier moments of my journey I may even admit that I put myself in this swamp so that I’d have circumstances to blame for my lack of courage.

Maybe the truth is that I’m afraid of showing up at these emerald towers and finding that the doors are locked, that I needed an invitation to get inside, I just missed the cut. If I arrive, I suddenly have to accept that they don’t look quite the same up close. 

I’m always submerged in one daydream or another, often hopping back and forth between them in the same thought like some divine gemstone skipping across the water of possibility. All of the moments and their budding characteristics that have defined me grew not in the brazen light of day but in the quiet, still, isolated void that I created out of every glistening scrap of magic I could find. 

These dreams hold me together like delicate scaffolding. Everything I am feeds from the waters of their boundless energy. Perhaps it’s unwise for a dreamer to come in too close of proximity to their fantasies lest they look different from up close.