Simple Dreamer

In those gentle hours between waking and sleeping I ask myself If I don’t go for THE thing what would the next thing be?

The simple dreamer I meet in this moment is an excellent source of clarity. She knows that things are not truly as complicated as I make them out to be in daylight hours and that the act of wanting is vital to my survival.

Ear pressed against my pillow she tells me, there is nothing else.

She is right. She is always right. I hate and love that she is right.

I can go to her in these moments and she tells me what I need to hear but not necessarily what I want to hear. I want her to tell me if I don’t choose the big life that I desire there is a perfectly easy and attainable one waiting to take its place.

I want her to tell me that there is a secondary option that will great me with equal satisfactionwhen I enter its doors. She does not tell me this. She tells me the truth instead.

Later into the night, this dewy skinned gentle version of me is replaced with one that wakes wild-eyed and sweaty in my blankets.

This frantic fearer tells me my writing is bullshit and that the only place safe for me in this world is this bed and most definitely not all of those foreign worlds that are associated with my next big thing.

For a few moments, I believe that she is right until I remember that she is dangerous.

She is the version of me that will not let me sleep even though I am tired and she is the version of me that feeds on the air she sucks from my lungs.

I used to think these two women of the night were the same person. That they shared the same body and that the thoughts she offered me during the shallow end of the night were covered with a wishful haze of my own thinking and that her statements in the depths of the night were unobstructed ones of truth.

Now, I recognize that these two women are as different as night and dusk

I choose to believe the simple dreamer but the only way I have of knowing if I have chosen right is to try.

If I have chosen wrong I will fail and as soon as I step foot off of my next flight to New Delhi I will be swallowed up by a dense buzzing cloud of my own fear, worlds away from the safety of my bed.

But if I have chosen right, I will have left my frantic fearer Stateside in the bed she desperately wished I would not leave and my simple dreamer and I will be free to take our turn at living.