Aisling

There’s familiarity to it all.

Each person knows to have a dream. Each person the little girl meets has one. They are expected to have one, just as they are expected to grow old and grow up.

A dream, the little girl learns, is different from the kinds of dreams that gather at her eyelashes at night, surrounded by inky darkness and the slivers of light that slip through her curtains. A dream is something to chase after. A dream is something she wants. A dream is that little flicker of light, that little fairy hidden in the depths of her reality. A dream makes her supple, translucent, loose like candle wax: as if a single spark could make and unmake everything.

Here, she dreams and sleeps in thoughts and feelings that hold onto her like hands, reaching out to keep her here. Her path is drawn by luminescent footsteps, each one as precise as the other, as if expecting her to follow perfectly. There is no earth and sky, no land and water. There is nothing except her, floating in this space that is so tight and so clenched and so firm that she has reach out and imagine something, dream something—

The striking of a piano key, the pull of a thread and needle, the twirling of ribbons, the crunching of chips, the making of a new friend, the reunion of two old ones.

A dream is whatever you want it to be.