Is It Too Much To Dream That We Can Forever Be?

like look at Smaug, look at his ears, DON’T YOU JUST WANT TO SCRATCH BEHIND HIS EARS AND TELL HIM HE’S A GOOD BOY

and look at this guy, I guess he’s supposed to be ferocious but it looks more like “whoa man chill out, I’m just saying that those shoes with that helmet was maybe not the greatest fashion decision, just a little friendly advice, no need to get defensive.”

THIS LITTLE BB ALL CURLED UP AND TAKIN’ A NAP

I want this one to live in my pocket and be my sassy talking dragon sidekick

SO SMILEY!! “gonna go terrorize some helpless villagers aw yiss”

but my favorite is this little doodle here

just look at him

One weekend i spent with my dad and when I came back she had repainted my room. A beautiful deep blue on three walls (my favourite colour), lovely sky blue on the ceiling,and one wall was black. The black wall had been sanded smooth and painted with several coats of chalkboard paint. She gave me a couple boxes of chalk and told me to have at it. I LOVED that black wall and wrote on it every day. I drew on it, I doodled, I wrote out my favourite emo song lyrics, wrote reminders for myself, anything I wanted. It was my favourite part of my room and was something that it would have never occurred to me to ask for. It was something only my very creative and clever mom could have come up with and I’m still grateful to her for it.

-The other night I rolled over in the middle of the night to shake my partner awake, proceeded to tell him how I was glad that ‘this time round we would truly have the freedom to love each other properly’ and how his hands belonged to his last self, but his eyes had never changed in all the lives I’d known him. And he just laid there in the dark like wtf because I was asleep. Like I’d woken him to tell him that all in my sleep and then left him to have a crisis.

- Watching the history channel with my Pop on the couch, tender age of 7, and they’re talking about crucifixion. And my pop, ever the funny man, is like “that looks like it aughta hurt”. And I just turn to look at him and without hesitation reply “only at first”. And he’s like “what do you mean” and tiny me just shrugged and said “well there’s a place beyond the hurt where everything just stops” and he turned the telly off and left the room.

- night before Christmas 2012, dreamt I’d been stabbed in the lungs by an angel with the face of a falcon. He looked at me and told me he had to do it, so that ‘my next breath would come as a rebirth’. When he started to glow so brightly that it burned my eyes, I woke up to all the lights in my house on and a dark bruise beneath my rib cage. Will admit, that one freaked me out.

- walked past a graveyard with a friend back in middle school on the way to her house, and mid conversation I stopped talking and stood stock still, looked over at the walls,and quietly said “I have a friend in there”. Then picked up the conversation and continued strolling like nothing had happened. To be fair, I didn’t realise what I’d said. She still tells me I’m the reason she can’t walk past that graveyard anymore.

- a couple of years ago when I was in Wales I walked past an old stone house just outside of Aberystwyth, and just started to weep. I had the overwhelming thought that I needed to be in there to get dinner ready for the children, but in a different life so long ago and so impossible to reach, that thefeeling of loss was instant and overwhelming.

- was about to use a pedestrian crossing, when my whole body just sort of went hey don’t do that, and so I stopped and put my arm out to stop the woman who was crossing behind me, and 2 seconds later a car came skidding around the corner and crashed into the tree on the other side of the crossing, and I just whispered “ha, not this time” and didn’t really think about it until later when I realised I’d nearly died again. (Btw i waited for th ambulance to show up and the dude driving the car was fine, just hit his head and was drunk af at 10:30am on a Thursday).

- another dream I had just this week, I was sitting in an otherwise empty cinema with a tall, thin man. I can’t really recall what he looked like, except he was well dressed, impossibly pale, and he kind of blurred when you looked directly at him, so I mainly watched him out the corner of my eye and looked ahead at the blank movie screen. He was holding my hand, and he asked me if i enjoyed my life. I said yes and explained why. He then said, almost verbatim, “And how does this one weigh against the last? Can it tip the scales, or is it, at last, to be found lacking?” And I replied, almost verbatim “I weigh my lives against my joy, and each life I find there is more joy to be discovered.” He replied with a laugh, lifted my hand to a kiss and said “till next time then” and disappeared. I woke up in the dark with both my cats sitting on me, alert, and staring out my bedroom door.

My sister and I have also been known to argue in our sleep. Witnesses assure us that whatever made the shouting start, we both knew what it was and were mad about it. We don’t need to be in the same room for this.

And every time, I ask them, what do you think? What are you feeling? And many of them are hesitant to respond so I’ll prompt, “Was it sad? Was it boring?” And as soon as they know I’m not gonna judge them for it, 100% of the time, they respond, “I feel bad that I don’t feel as moved by it as you. You cried when you told us about it and I get that it was such a horrible day and so many people died, but I can’t really think of what life was like before or just after that time.”

That really struck me the first time I heard it because these kids really don’t remember a time when things were so carefree and relatively quiet. Little to no security screenings. Almost zero school shootings. Kids stayed outside by themselves until the street lamps came on.