Sometimes, freedom is a glorious mirage.
Once, I had a dream that I was stuck in a grate and yearning walked over me.
And just when I thought I wouldn’t miss it anymore, yearning stepped on me again.
I grasped at the putrid metal bars above me, speechless in a way that only my dream self would be, because if I was alive and in myself as only my outward self can be, I would demand from passersby that I be given attention.
No one was distinct until yearning walked over me. And while everyone was a blur of vague recognition, I knew yearning.
Yearning didn’t look down at me between the grates, so I only saw the bottom half of her face. But it was smiling. And her eyes – how could I see her eyes, if she didn’t look down at me? – I knew her eyes were full of promise.
Not the promise of a recent college graduate who was still high off of a commencement speech, but the promise of a woman who had been successful and witnessed the promise of success in the horizon. Beyond those skyscrapers. Maybe even across the seas.
Enough success to buy shoes that didn’t have holes in them.
When yearning finally stopped promenading across my grate prison, my chest was so full I wondered if my small cement hole in the ground had flooded with water, as per so many other nightmares. But, no, that was despair, who joined with yearning.
When yearning re-appeared, it felt like he had been gone for no time at all, although while I waited, gasping for hope, I could have sworn I had slept twenty weeks.
Yearning was a man who probably didn’t exist.
He stood above the grate and searched.
Sometimes, he even hunted.
But not once did he look down, where I beheld all of the times I had glanced at a man for seconds not even worthy of the time and released lovers who were wastes and wondered where was THIS man, who was waiting for me with eyes that I could not see – for how could I see them below the grate? – but I knew they were pursuing me.
And when he left I knew the time between my yearning for love and home would be replaced by another yearning that would capture my soul for seconds that felt like minutes that lasted until my lungs were at capacity from screaming or drowning, but I could not escape from the small hole my life abandoned me in, no matter how much promise others had put in me.
So, I waited for the next yearning.