Wide Awake & Dreaming

Is it possible that everything that has molded me into the person I am today is just a hoax? That the qualities, the truths, I thought were true are anything but? Is love anything more than a chemical reaction in the brain? Is fate anything more than a few coincidences? Is the sky blue? Is upside down really right-side up?

I don't know what to think anymore.

It was nearly eleven, my light was out, but my brain wasn't. I was wide awake, and still am at quarter past midnight. Even with my music in for the last hour, sleep is about as close as...as world is to peace – as close as dark is to light. It's not coming anytime soon, and it's all because I can't turn my damn brain off.

I've thought about so many things in such a sort span of time, to list them all would take the time only insomniacs have. Half of the things are controversial – things I know are wrong, that my mind dignifies as something I would never do – but I think about them anyway.

I think of running away, grabbing someone along the way – it doesn't matter who, as long as they're comfortable with the silence – and going to the pond behind the school. I think of laying on the sand, feeling the soft, cool grains between my toes and sifting through my fingers while I gaze up at the sky finding constellations that I didn't even know existed until whoever I decided to come with me pointed them out.

I remember, I was seven or eight, it was daytime and my mother was pulling out of the parking lot of Roche Bros. in Acton. The sun was bright, the sky was a perfect blue, and I remember being so confident in saying, “Did you know that stars are in the sky all the time? That the sun's brightness just blocks them out during the day.”

Then, I was ignorant. I thought my mother truly was surprised by this news, but then again I also thought Santa Claus was real, that I could be anything if I truly wanted to. I thought the world was safe, and nice, and bad things rarely happened.

Oh, how ignorance is truly bliss.

We'd stay at the pond, on the sand, until the sun rose – until the sky turned from black to a hazy, navy blue to cotton candy pink.

I don't know if we'd talk or not. Maybe I would mention my first doubts of love, of fate. It's hard to believe, I know, especially since my romanticism – my belief in these two fundamental things –doesn't even begin to define me; it is me. I can't remember a time when it wasn't.
But how can the universe possibly work so methodically and perfectly that every piece fits exactly where it's supposed to? What about pieces that are forced into place, like a jigsaw piece that doesn't quite fit, but you make it anyway? What happens to the piece that was supposed to fit there? Does it wander around in limbo with the others, never finding a true meaning in life?

It's these questions that are so mind-twisting. There's never an answer, not one that can be proved anyway.

Is fate real? Does everything really happen for a reason? Or do things happen randomly throughout time, and it's just the way they are analyzed by a person that gives them the answer the want? The universe is too jumbled and spontaneous to even have concrete reasons for every little thing that happens. Maybe everything is exactly what it is.

But is 'everything' – is fate – anything different than false evidence of our own little, twisted hopes and fantasies?

*

I once read someone's essay on reality, and it opened a whole new point of view on life. Is it something that we solely create in our minds? Or, maybe, one day we'll wake up no older than a newborn in a crib and it'll turn out that this 'reality' isn't anything of the sort.

Maybe then we would have the second chances we've always wanted, we'd tell ourselves not to make the same mistakes, we could live the way we want to because we've already done it once.

After all, this reality, or what we believe is reality, is only proved by our senses, our mind's interpretation of the world around us.

Sense of smell; how one specific scent can bring us back to a specific memory or person within seconds, a scent that raises a sort of nostalgia we didn't even know was possible before-hand.

Seeing the bright blue of the sky on a summer day, the curve of someone's perfect smile and how their laugh lines form parenthesis around their lips.

Hearing someone's voice that gives us instant comfort, an area of familiarity in the strangeness of a situation; a song that brings back memories we might not want to remember.

Taste of our mother's home-cooked baked ziti that brings you back to the teenage nights where it was your favorite meal and all you wanted to eat.

Feeling their fingers against your skin, the cold, sea water against you, sand falling through your fingertips. Sadness. Happiness. Love. Loneliness. Conflict. Everything and anything.

In the end, is reality even real at all? Could it be a figment of our very own imaginations? The people who are our best friends, the people we fall in love with, are nothing more than intangible ideas – a simple thought going through your mind.

*

This entire essay probably sounds completely idiotic, when you get down to it. After all, am I anything more than a fourteen-year-old having an epiphany at nearly one o'clock at night? Maybe not. Maybe someone has already thought all the thoughts I have, and out of the billions of people on earth, chances are, they have.

I remember sitting in class, not more than a year ago, and thinking, “The boy I am going to marry is sitting out there right now. In school. Does he think about me; the girl he's going to marry? Does he ever wonder, like I do, what I'm like?”

I still think about this, occasionally, but now, it's just not as clear cut as it used to be. Love is no longer so far away, but it's not what everyone says it is, either. It's more. It's less. It changes from person to person. Love, if it's even real, is the smell of their shampoo mixed with the sweet scent of Downy laundry detergent, it's their smile just because, it's a heart beat. A thought. An idea.

And yet, that just brings us back to if this idea, this thought, this heart beat is even real in the beginning.

*

Even now, I still don't know what to think, what to believe. Is fate something I can continue to rely on? Or is it about as much of a waste of time as I'm discovering it is. Are all these jumbled signs I'm getting from people, possibly from the universe, significant? Because if they are, I'm beyond confused. I don't have the faintest clue where to begin to sort this mess out.

Yet, here I am, still wide awake at quarter past one, Coldplay playing on my iPod.

Maybe, some day, I will run away from here to the pond to think. To cry. To talk. To sleep. Because sleep, my dreams, are what make me forget about everything else. And being wide awake and thinking – wide awake and dreaming – destroys you because you're aware of the hell around you, but teased by the dreams you want to come true, too.

*

“I'll buy a gun and start a war if you can tell me something worth fighting for.”

Is anything worth it?