I often daydream of the places my feet will graze, eyes still bright and hopes lifted boldly above my head in a handful of future years when I will finally understand who I am. Oftentimes, I envision myself gazing through the frigid glass of my apartment window overlooking an entire city of hungry souls. Paired with a glass of pink champagne, I will study the intricate patterns in the way they carry themselves from one place to another, an entire kingdom of strangers dressed in pale blues and yellows and tans.
Who are they? What are they searching for?
I stand—a figure in a sheer black dress miles above, pondering upon the sea of incomprehensible gray swarming a thousand forevers below my feet. There exists a starving fear, one that reminds me that if my heels happen to break through the balcony, I will become one of them.
I dream of you returning home to me after an abstract day of trial and error. Even after the musky dust of today’s freedom collects upon your shoulders, you still smell the same familiar way you did when you were seventeen and unsure, wondering if I will be around to love you next year or tomorrow or only this afternoon.
Below us, they continue to travel, approaching midnight with a cautious volume that grows more and more lost as the hours waltz by. Some are hunting for a friendship that slipped like soap bubbles through the valleys between their fingers. The youthful delicacy of unrequited love. Some search for the art of escaping from a life that shattered their bones numb. Others, for salvation. A reason to permit their hearts to keep beating.
We are no longer wandering; instead, fingers intertwined at the success of a future that would not have obeyed the stars if we had not been like them before, pursuing dreams like pixie dust before they had the chance to grow up and become a little too impossible.
You kiss my forehead goodnight, drawing curtains and racing hearts. For once, I sleep. There is nothing left to search for.