Because I dared to dream

It took me four years to write it exactly how I wanted it.  With low light and dying pens, I scribbled and drew and sketched it out, beautifully, until I was so pleased with it that my tears glowed upon the pages.  I bound it, too, with scrap materials I had foraged.  It was a crude job, but I could afford nothing more and would have nothing less.  Finally, I walked to town and left it by the fountain.

It took two days for a small girl to find it.  She had dark hair like spilled ink, and her eyes shimmered with the dust of fairies.  It was as if destiny had led her to my book.

The years passed like a prerecording, years and years of things that felt like they had been done before in the same manner by hundreds of people across time.  I did not forget about my book; while I slowly bent and broke under sun-cursed work, wringing the substance from my hands, I dreamed about the places my true work, my art, had touched, the people it may have known.  And the girl did not forget it, either.  She grew older and became beautiful, her ink hair tied into a bun and her fairydust eyes shimmering now with intelligence, and she left for the university with my book tucked beneath her arm.  How many times she had read it, and how many times more she would!  If I had known how she loved it, my body would’ve flushed out and burst with the intensity of my purpose and the emotion of my dreams.

She went to school to become a businesswoman, inspired and supported by her parents.  Then, almost by chance, she found her music.  Her voice was powerful and rich, like the ocean or the sky, and it seemed as if it could move the very earth to tremble.  She felt her soul unraveling itself in her navel and surging upwards through her vocal chords.  Once she started, she could never bring herself to stop.  It was my book, my art, that gave her the courage to drop out and pursue her new gift, much to her parents’ chagrin.

While in school, she had fallen in love with a youthful aspiring politician, and she found a place in him to write her music.  He was hardworking and somewhat taciturn, but he was burning with inspiration and the need for action.  And as he struggled to reconcile his ideas of truth and justice with those of the state, she wrapped my book as a gift and gave it to him.  She told him its story, or what she knew of it, and he read it carefully.

He read it, and he stopped trying to wrap himself around the philosophies of others.  Instead, he found himself a high place, and with the sun at his back, he opened his mouth wide and let his fire rip through the streets.  People were burned by him.  They stopped what they were doing, stunned and breathless, and looked up to his silhouetted body.  He placed a new clog in their minds, and more came to him, until cities and nations were calling for his flame.

All because of my book.  All because of four years of low light and dying pens, because I dreamed of something that seemed small to others but was so big, so deep, to me.

Dreams—amazing things that can turn a life into a world, visions that can stop the movement of the stars.  Those who dream have tools placed into their hands that can rewrite destinies, tools like hope and love and passion.  Without my dream, I would have died an old, crooked woman with leather skin, alone and penniless, insignificant as the dirt I worked.  But with it, I helped birth a star.  I helped form a new philosophy.  I was the creator of the creator of a new way of thought.  We all dreamed big, impossible dreams, and we touched them with power we found inside of us—the moment we made the decision to let our passion free, we were gone.