that dream of mine.

We burst out of a glass-paneled restaurant as the sun is beginning to fall. Dappled shadows lengthen and stretch across the lake and the forest that surrounds it. The light of summertime is finally draping this place, and it is warm even as night is beginning to fall. The taste of cheap restaurant mint lingers in my mouth and the air carries with it a light scent of pine. 

We take a walk along the paved path to the gazebo. I grip your hand tightly, our fingers interlocked, afraid of losing you in the blink of an eye. When you've dreamed of something for so long, and it finally becomes real -- you fear that it is a mirage. Just another daydream, a carefully crafted visual that can be lost in the very second that a careless car speeds past you, jolting you back into cold reality. 

But you aren't a dream this time. 

The gazebo stands at the edge of the lake, a blurry reflection dancing in blue. The Fresnel effect causes that blue reflection to fade into clarity the closer it gets to the shoreline. In the shallows, we can see smooth rocks and sand. Tiny fish dart from rock to rock, underneath the ripples. 

I am lost here, blissfully lost, in the paradise of this warm night. You. Are. Perfect. Your smile like a firefly, a burst of light in the gloom. Your embrace powerful like a sandstorm blowing across the desert of an alien world. Your bright blue eyes like the sea crashing into rocky cliffs. I see your sadness in those eyes, and I want nothing more than to make it stop the way mine never does. I want to hear about your pain, how they hurt you, how I can make it better. I want to rescue you just as badly as I want to be rescued myself. Maybe we can rescue each other. 

Sometimes during this evening I gaze at you and sometimes I gaze at the mountains and how they pierce the sky. The stars are beginning to blink into existence over those mountains, as the sky darkens. But the warmth of this night will not end. I feel the boundaries between fantasy and reality breaking. The mountains hum with the magic of witches, and the airplanes become spaceships, bound for distant planets fifty thousand light years away. It feels as though we've successfully departed this world altogether -- the trees singing their poetry to us, the sky alight with the smoke of dragons. 

Tonight, I will hold you in my arms, and sing you to sleep. Even as one who has always been drawn to the visual arts, to depict scenes of fantasy, I have always loved music. And now, I get to dedicate my songs to you. 

I am so grateful to have you now. I don't have to dream anymore. But I would wait trillions of years for you. I would wait an eternity for you. Mathematically, eternity has no end, yet I would wait for you for that long anyway. If something ripped us apart, I would break the bounds of reality to find you again. I would travel across the multiverse. I would destroy the laws of physics. I would make the impossible possible; the uncountable countable. I would make infinity finite. I would make the imagined real. Even if we were universes apart, even if I could never touch you or see you at all, I would know you're out there. I would seek for you every day, in the astral realm, in the waking realm, in the lucid realm, in the world of daydreams, in hypnagogia and hypnopompia; always hoping, searching, believing. 

I love you for your everything. Your ambition, your vulnerability, your intelligence, your creativity, your flirtatiousness, your fearlessness. I know what lies beyond that flirtatious façade, that confident extroversion. It is the same thing that lies beyond my quietude -- despair, longing, loneliness, constant misunderstanding, a wish for a world better than this one. I hurt too, almost constantly. But with you, the pain stops. You can cry for hours on my shoulder and I will never let go of you. 

You navigate social situations so much easier than I. I was always so timid, so quiet, filled with stuttering and selective mutism, so afraid to be hurt and laughed at like I was as a child, that I buried myself and put up the highest walls I ever could. No one could hurt me if they didn't know who I was. But you tore those walls down. You weren't afraid, and because of you, I'm not afraid anymore either. 

I know your past and how others look down upon you for it. But I don't care. I see the goodness in you and I don't care what you've done. All I care about is that I love you. 

I've never been talented in the physical realm. My mind was always lost in fantasies and ideas, and I lived in a vivid world of imagination, instead of reality. This translated to a lack of facility in real-world domains, such as athletics, woodwork, and yard work. I worked hard in sports, I got in shape, and I stayed consistent. I still do now. But I will never be an athlete. 

But the way you dance with a grace that I've never had -- the way you twirled across the parking lot, your movements undulating like freshwater swirling over rocks. It is beautiful to me. Alien, but beautiful. You turn crumbling asphalt into the white sands of a tropical sea. 

I hate dancing. I am awkward and uncoordinated, and I hate sweating when I'm not in my workout clothes. But I would dance with you, in a garden filled with flowers and glowing lights, until the end of the world. I would dance with you even if we danced our way off a cliff, plummeting forever into a black abyss. I would dance with you even if it meant we would never stop. I would sacrifice everything I own, everyone I know, and every single thing I have achieved, to hold you in my arms even for a second. 

I would spend hours in front of the mirror making myself look perfect for you. I would destroy my body every day at the gym to make it look right for you. I will ace every single class I take, I will excel in every passion that ever strikes my heart, I will understand every difficult scientific concept that I ever come across. I will do it for you, to be everything you've ever dreamed of. 

Indeed, everything I do is for you, even if it doesn't seem like it. Every word of every story and every poem I have ever read or written. Every piece of art I've ever made. Every line of code that I have ever typed. Every technical issue I've ever resolved. Every mathematical or scientific concept I've ever taught myself. Every mile I've ever run or walked; every weight I've ever lifted. Every hard workout I've ever pushed myself through; I did it because I was dreaming of you. Every note of music I have every played, every fantasy world or fictional universe I've ever immersed myself in. Everything. Love drives every single thing that I do. Without the hope for it, nothing else matters. 

I will never give up on my dreams for you, to be with you forever, far beyond the confines of this hellish, dull, gray world. The most convincing logical argument cannot stop me. The derision and disapproval of others cannot stop me. The constraints of time, earth, and space cannot stop me. Even God himself cannot stop me. Nothing can stop the fire of love that burns deep within us. No ordinance or law of man or of physics or of God. Love burns more powerful than the brightest quasars in the deepest reaches of space. It is the evenstar; the driving force behind every single world. Every single soul. Every single god. 

To hold someone you love tightly and never let them go is to stand above the highest of gods. 

We hold each other as the music of crickets and frogs begin to blend with the rustling trees, the symphony of the forest. This world is hell; I am convinced of it. But your embrace is what constitutes heaven. For the first time since I was a little child, I don't feel sad anymore. Instead, I feel at peace. Tonight, I understand love that endures and passion that never dies. Tonight, our world is thick with the scent of your perfume and my cologne, and our night sky is full of galaxies. 

***

A siren from the deep came to me,

Sang my name, my longing. 

Still, I write my songs

About that dream of mine...

Worth everything I may ever be. 

~ Nightwish

***

IDK why I like gazebos so much. But yeah. This was stewing in my head during my long run yesterday, so I figured I'd write it out and chuck it here. It never sounds as good on paper as it does in your head. Nonetheless, it was a good writing exercise -- clichés and all. I'm reasonably pleased with the end result. It isn't perfect, but it's fun.