09/05/25

In dreams, we leave our hearts on the backs of motorcycles, and in wake we spend eons searching for our hearts.

In dreams we’re driving fast and something keeps up beside us. A shadow, a wave, a forgotten souvenir, begging to be remembered. We peer out the window, the shadow is Mom. Mom who works late nights teaching adults how to talk properly or something, and we’re a child, four and a half, who is also a wave and a forgotten souvenir. 

We don’t recognize a single thing beyond the shadow that is mom but we name it all anyway. 

The peripheral smudge of red but also green and also black, we call grandma. The spitting bubbles spewing from the smudge we call, grandma’s meatballs, if we’re italian, or we call them trivial, if we’re dumb.

The rotting feeling within us we call our parents’ fault

And the curious one, we call frivolous.

Asleep we find a little blue alarm clock from our childhood trip to Disneyland covered in lint-rimmed stickers of mickey mouse, except we’ve never been to Disneyland and the notion that we got into a fight with mom in Tomorrowland then ran away to Adventureland, tripping over our sticky ice cream soaked shoelaces, is merely a mirage, and the alarm clock is really just our left hand a couple blinks later.

So again we’re a child and a wave and a forgotten or never known souvenir, but in the same breath, we don’t know what we are.

Awake, we spend eons searching for our hearts and really the searching doesn’t cease when we drift into slumber, but instead it lingers in the quest for the clock or the wave or grandma. It lingers so peculiarly that by the time the clock becomes our hand we don’t even notice the findings right under our nose; doomed to awaken a groggy excuse for a seeker, oblivious that finding your hand is only three letters away from finding your heart.

In wake, we knowingly advise people to stop saying “I don't know”, as a sentence filler, because really they do know and don’t mislead yourself or you’ll end up far away, Yet when we run into ourselves on a corner across the street from what we struggle to deem either hell or disneyland, and we tell us everything about ourselves and teach us corners of our brain we have yet to learn and whisper many answers in our ears, we for once resign our council and can confidently say that we not only ‘don’t know’...we don’t have even the slightest clue.