What Happened When I Followed My Dream
The trilling drills into your brain.
“Alexa, shut up,” you shout. She huffs a boing but simmers down. You burrow deeper into comfy covers while the dawn light meanders across the wall of your sparse Brooklyn bedroom. Is it OK to languish and swallow the thousand nagging doubts and “what the hell were you thinking?” Of deciding to leave an inexpensive life in shadows and ghost-walking, of grays and drab routines? Daily shuffling from one bored action to the next throttled with miniature suburban hands. Was it OK to admit defeat?
You threw up the ultimatum to the man you share that bed with. Vomited it one scorching August night in DC.
“You don’t have to go, but I am,” you chose a life of possibles and maybes and what the hell was I thinking.
Were you afraid? Terrified? Horrified in the aftermath? Mostly surprised at how easy it was to adapt to a third-floor walk-up in an up and potential coming neighborhood. “Just a few years ago, this was a war zone,” you heard from long-time residents.
“Heh, I survived a war zone,” you murmured. “Bushwick’s got nothing on Israel in ‘73 or my childhood living room.”
You mean not everyone walked around with palm-print bruises across their faces? It was only me? And perhaps you? And you too? But fewer of us to be sure than most.
The worst part was the constant dream suffocation. “You will never be what you want. You’ll be only what I want you to be.” He didn’t deserve my true dreams so he never heard them. If I spoke of them, he’d throttle them in their sleep. So, I kept silent. And even my self-whispers eventually hushed, until I lost them in that homey facade in Detroit.
It took years to remember and reconstruct and resurrect my dream from the dead and dying places of childhood, the rotting swings and dead dogs. And when I finally recalled and fleshed it out, only one answer remained.
Billy Joel said it best, I was in a New York State of Mind. Some dismiss it as too big and violent and dizzy. It blazes me to life in ways no other “home” has ever done. The crazed rushing, the detailed attention to art and music and business that careens everywhere and everywhen. 24/7. Go anywhere and breathe the oxygen of any art and all creation. Survive on it. Stand above it and witness the scurries of so many who need and crave and strive and will never give up on their dream, the one dream, the only dream.
Why should they? It’s their state of mind, too.
