In the mornings clarity settles in without any judgement.
There is something sacred about the first few moments before the world remembers your name.
Before the phone lights up.
Before coffee has convinced your body to participate.
Before obligations begin collecting their debt.
The mind is quiet then.
It has already spent the night doing work no one applauds.
Perhaps sleep was never meant for rest.
Perhaps it was always meant for negotiations.
Every night I disappear into a country that refuses to stay on any map.
Half my life has been spent there, yet I could never tell you where it is.
The streets rearrange themselves.
The laws of gravity politely excuse themselves.
Faces belong to strangers until they smile, and then suddenly they’ve always been someone I’ve known.
Curious how memory wears different clothing after midnight.
I’ve survived more car accidents asleep than awake.
I’ve drowned without dying.
Fallen from towers that somehow never reach the ground.
Walked beside creatures that would send zoologists into early retirement.
Yet every morning I wake up with nothing more than a racing heart and a lingering feeling that someone forgot to explain the ending.
Or perhaps…
The ending isn’t missing.
Perhaps I keep waking up too early.
There is a winding road I visit more often asleep than I have ever visited awake.
I know every curve before I reach it.
Every tree leans exactly where I remember.
Every shadow waits where it always has.
I could draw it with my eyes closed, yet if you asked me where it exists, I couldn’t point to it on any map ever printed.
So tell me…
How can a place you’ve never been become your oldest memory?
That feels like a riddle someone forgot to solve.
Then there are the towers.
Always the towers.
They rise without warning, impossible against impossible skies.
Sometimes I climb them.
Sometimes I fall from them.
Sometimes I simply stand beneath them wondering why every dream architect seems obsessed with vertical construction.
Maybe towers aren’t built to keep people out.
Maybe they’re built to see who still looks up.
The water always returns too.
Not clear water.
Murky water.
The kind that hides more than it reflects.
Snakes move beneath the surface like forgotten thoughts searching for daylight.
Everyone fears the snake because it can bite.
Few fear the water that convinced them it wasn’t there.
Another riddle.
Which one is truly dangerous…
The thing you see…
Or the thing that teaches you not to look?
Then they arrive.
The ones who no longer have birthdays.
The relatives who have traded calendars for eternity.
They never seem frightened.
They never seem rushed.
They speak with the confidence of people who already know the ending to the book while I’m still trying to understand chapter three.
They tell me they’re okay.
They smile in ways that living people often forget how to smile.
And every morning I ask the same question.
Were they visiting…
Or was I?
Perhaps grief never closes the front door.
Perhaps it simply changes the address.
There are others too.
The travelers.
The watchers.
The ones who stand just outside the conversation like actors waiting for someone to remember their lines.
They never introduce themselves.
They simply wait for me to notice them.
Sometimes I think they’ve been there my entire life, patiently watching me stumble through another lesson dressed as coincidence.
I always wake before introductions.
Terrible timing on my part.
I’ve begun wondering if dreams are less like movies and more like letters written in a language we forgot before birth.
We spend our days translating them with dictionaries that were never finished.
How frustrating that must be for whoever keeps sending them.
Imagine mailing someone the same letter every night for fifty years only to discover they keep reading it upside down.
I’d probably start getting symbolic too.
Maybe that’s why the universe hides everything inside metaphors.
Not because it enjoys riddles…
But because certainty ends curiosity.
And curiosity is the only thing that keeps the soul walking.
Sometimes, just before sleep steals another evening from me, I imagine setting a kitchen table between both worlds.
Nothing elaborate.
Just two chairs.
A cup of coffee for me.
Whatever spirits drink for them.
No riddles.
No giant snakes.
No towers.
No mysterious winding roads disappearing into impossible forests.
No cryptic symbolism requiring three decades of overthinking.
Just honesty.
I’d lean forward and say…
“Listen… I’m really more of a direct-message kind of person.”
You don’t have to hide the lesson inside collapsing buildings.
You don’t have to disguise it as my grandmother wearing someone else’s face.
You don’t have to make me outrun things that don’t exist.
You could simply tell me.
I’ll write it down.
Promise.
But maybe…
Just maybe…
They already have.
Maybe the conversation isn’t happening while I’m asleep.
Maybe it’s happening every single day, buried beneath ordinary moments that I keep calling ordinary because they weren’t dramatic enough to earn my attention.
The stranger who smiled.
The song that arrived at the exact second it needed to.
The bird that refused to leave the windowsill.
The number that keeps following you from receipt to receipt.
The road you’ve somehow driven a thousand times without realizing it was trying to teach you direction instead of distance.
Perhaps dreams aren’t messages at all.
Perhaps they are rehearsals.
Perhaps morning isn’t waking up.
Perhaps it’s intermission.
Which leaves one final riddle.
If every dream is a letter…
And every morning is the envelope opening…
Who exactly is writing to whom?
Because maybe the voice I’ve spent an entire lifetime trying to hear…
Has been patiently waiting for me to stop listening with my ears.
(**I’m trapped in writers block)
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