Tears of a Seasoned Dreamer
by freakyAngel

--

Dedicated to all the dreamers out there. Bellas and monsieurs, this is for all of you.
Keep the dreams on fire, no matter how much they hurt.

--

You're hurtling down a corridor, the people you encounter rushing past you so quickly they are an amalgamation of fleeting humanity. Your eyes are open but closed, simultaneously dry and wet as your mind howls in your ears, screaming, crying, pleading for you to remember, to realize, to finally know your past.

Yet, however much your mind wants so badly to recover its memory, your heart shrieks in objection. Why remember? it asks you, its echo in your soul resonating with such profound sadness and fear that you recoil, Why remember what's not meant to be?

And you're still hurtling through that same corridor, with the same people rushing, gliding, flying past you, and your eyes hurt and you are so torn between dream and reality you don't know where to go.

Sometimes it's not the prolonged feelings that hurt you the most. It's the most fleeting ones, the ones so flighty and brief they leave you aching for more yet wishing never to feel it ever again, that leaves you feeling as vulnerable as you can ever get.

The feeling of sadness, of anger, of pain - we've all been through it. Joy, amusement, hope - we've felt them, too. But the one that keeps you up at night, the one that destroys and creates you all at the same time, the one that hurts you so deep in the chest you're left with helplessness and a well of tears forever too solid to flow - that's the one that we can never put a name to.

We dream of it, hoping to feel it again, to have it in us for a longer period of time, because it is what gives us our humanity. Animals and plants and insects are unable to emulate this feeling; humans are broken, destroyed, and remade in spilt-second, unending cycles as we move through life.

So long as we have a soul, we will feel this miraculous armageddon for a long time to come.

The corridor ends so suddenly you seem to have fallen asleep - your eyelashes fan open to reveal a new surrounding that you know you have arrived at in the time it took you to close and open your eyes again. You're aware that time has long moved on, never waiting and never stopping - you just don't know how much of it has left.

It's a lot like what you see inside of your eyelids, this world, only you sense it's much bigger and much emptier. It's just as dark, just as tempestuous, and just as amorphous; only much, much, much more terrifying.

You don't know if you're moving or speaking or even looking; in here, everything is an uncertainty. You may be walking forward, or running to your left, or even just drifting in midair; you may be screaming for help, whispering your fear, or babbling incoherently; you may be looking around with your eyes wide open, blinking away your tears, or staring at the insides of your eyelids.

It may be the universe, this world; the universe in the eyes of itself, the universe in its heart and soul, the universe in all its enormity. This world you're in, it may be the universe. You can't be sure - but you know you sensed that it's just as big. Whatever the case, it is black, sheer darkness, and there are no lights save for the minute shreds of white specks that seem to be so far away. Whatever the case, it is too far away from life, from humanity, from the pulse that you never felt was there but now makes you beat your chest so desperately at its absence.

Whatever the case,

On all accounts,

You are unreachable.

There lies in us a sense of hopelessness and loss of direction that will never be completely erased from our souls, no matter how unfeeling we become. It may even be the loss of most of our emotions that keeps this lost feeling in us so deeply rooted. We feel this vulnerability from time to time, never for prolonged periods and never in its full intensity, but it is enough for us to break down and fall to our knees in tears that we are unable to shed.

We know there is nothing we can do about this sense of hopelessness. It is our root, the crux to our living pulse, the hidden humanity in our souls that keeps us going even when all is lost. When all is lost, when everything is wrong, when nothing feels true anymore, it is to this inner hopelessness that we turn to. It may be bitter, it may be excruciating, it may be the scissors to the already-frayed strand of life; but, when everything crashes down on you, it is the only thing you can turn to. Perhaps the mentally unstable are so because of this hopelessness in them; yet, it is possible that they are the ones who are the closest to the core of humanity.

We are but humans, after all;

Who are we to judge?

It is then that one of the white speck flares. A silent supernova at first, like in slow motion a defined cloud of flames birthed from a single spark. Then it explodes with such deafening silence you hear the bang mutedly resonating in your very essence. And it brings forth a plethora of images, sounds, feelings, all rushing past you like the people in that corridor, all pushing into you as they fight to let you remember them first.

And you, with that echoing scream in your heart and that stunned overwhelm in your mind, struggle and fail to take it all in. They still slam into you, but you cannot truly see them.

You break down. It isn't like how one would cry with ostensible deep despair; no, it is like a crumbling of now-hollow walls. Your insides are dissolving, disintegrating into mere nothingness, yet you appear to be just crumbling wearily on the outside, cracking anciently and slowly dropping into mere darkness. It is not unlike the break-off of the overhang of a massive ice cliff as it sinks into the water.

And yet.

And yet.

And yet...

You can't cry.