The Mirror of Truth

Another short fiction piece inspired by Stephanie at be kind rewrite. This weeks prompt: ‘I used to have dreams’. Enjoy!

I used to have dreams

I used to have dreams, thought Pete as he lazed the extra hour in bed. Springs that wound taught with anticipation for what’s to come. Nowadays life had caught up with his dreams, swamped and overwhelmed them with reality. Pete had always been a forest kind of guy. The trees, well they had never really interested him. Now passing his thirty-third year with his dreams more remote than ever, he had had to accept the trees were pretty important.

Give him the stage and he could talk the ears off anyone. Give him a pen and just watch it jerk over the page as if by magic, responding to all those dreams within, where they stewed until they could escape, each one’s passage to the ether marked by a spark of inspiration, a paroxysm of almost illegible script upon the page of his life. But life wasn’t just about wandering aimlessly through the countryside as a boy, playing at swordsmen with sticks. Or lying with his first sweetheart under the stars, as the long grass waved gentle susurrations above their interlocked bodies. Life was also about attention to detail and hard work at the things that mattered to you. Paying at sticks as a boy was a natural response to the passion that burned within. It was a passion that even lying in bed in the half light that penetrated his bedroom blind, he was determined to keep stoked. But as you grew up dreams had a tendency to drift if you didn’t do anything but dream.

That was the definition of a dreamer, Pete decided; someone like him who dreamed but didn’t do a damn thing about it. Who lay in bed on the morning of his thirty-third birthday, ignoring the quiet tear that traced its solemn way down his cheek, and pretended that he no longer needed to wind his inner spring. Things became more complicated as you grew up, he admitted and he’d been slow to cotton on to that. There were times when you had to examine each tree with painstaking care and skill, to see to the health of the whole forest. And when you climbed that hill at last and looked down at the wondrous wilderness of your own making, well that would make it all worthwhile.

Pete snorted. Enough  theorizing, enough thinking, enough escaping from life. If I fail and my dreams never come true I won’t deserve to cry. Not unless I’ve done my best to make them happen. Pete threw back his blanket and rose. Today I will take a step, maybe just a small one, he swore to himself. This will be my year’s resolution. Everyday I will do something, anything, to take a step closer to my dreams. I will be ready. I will pounce on what life offers. And the rest? Well for the rest, he sighed, I can dream.