Not all dreams need to be realised.
I woke up this morning in a haze. I’ve been sober for a few days, and my body has started to respond to it.
A certain malaise to my movements, and a throbbing headache that sits above one eye (my right) and a vague, elusive ache.
With an unscheduled day ahead of me, I turned off my phone and decided instead to stare at a much larger glass rectangle, and finish watching the two-hour long Fugazi documentary, Instrument.
It’s a striking film, about a striking band, and about creativity unbound by scale, unspoiled by the more widely accepted rules of commerce, and untouched by the false sincerity that has been plaguing my world of late.
When the documentary finished, on reels of soundless 8mm footage of the musicians flailing on stage, I stared at the ceiling for a good hour.
I was thinking about the rules and boundaries to which Fugazi paid no mind, and where I had let myself become fenced in.
There was a time when I was perfectly happy to live and work without the structures and impositions that I have taken on now, as a mantle, as a sense of safety for which I have bargained my freedom.
There was a time I had dreams that felt precious, that I either sacrificed too early or am failing to save.
Dreams keep me up at night.
They keep me from dreaming.
Eventually, I started to laugh at the vast, epic story I seem to live, inside my head in which everything has such cosmic significance that the story of Fugazi can turn a quiet morning into a violent episode of soul searching.
I dressed for the day in torn black jeans, and black converse with black laces, a black t-shirt, stained from a tour that ended almost a decade ago, a black denim jacket with a pin that a dear friend brought home for me from Europe.
You may notice a theme.
Finding my glasses became the quest of the morning, a bent pair of Raybans that have never been the same since I trod on them in a moment of passion with an ex-lover (like many of my possessions, they had been residing on my floor at the time) that I never remember to wear.
I did my makeup with a little more care than usual, a slower approach that shifted my work from a morning ritual to a quiet painting session, cross legged in front of my bedroom mirror.
The last of a tube of foundation, the last service of a patchy and blurred makeup sponge, a layer of foundation, and so on.
A part of me tries to paint womanhood onto my face.
A part of me objects to the concept.
A third part of me starts to feel hungry and begs for breakfast.
In a café whose name I still do not know, I sat on a mismatched chair, rested my elbows on a notched and scratched wooden table, and ordered a corn fritter and a few steaming hot cups of black filtered coffee.
Hot enough that my hands smarted as I held them, but in the cold of a Sydney morning, I rested the hot ceramic on my lap and felt warmed and nourished.
At the table next to me, a young trio with cakes and sandwiches talked about biphobia and fragments of their conversation drifted through the barriers of my books, and my iPad and my work, and in a small way I loved them for their honesty and their openness and their thoughtfulness.
In a small way, I envied their company and their conversation, and I thought of how few conversations I’ve had of late, in the real world, with eye contact and hand movements and excited voices.
When my eyes refocused on my book (M Train by Patti Smith) I read a sentence that caught me by surprise:
Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know.
Not all dreams need to be realised.
Some dreams can be just that. Dreams.
Dreams that comfort, that give us a source of warmth, that remind us of possibilities.
Some dreams can be relished, without being accomplished and yet without being mourned.
Dreams of friendships long gone.
Dreams of work never undertaken.
People whose love is now only a dream.
While I ate, my mind was consumed by the concept. While I wandered the city afterward on my skateboard, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
For the rest of my day, I re-examined my hurt, my fears, my hopes and my own work through that paradigm.
I don’t know what it means for me, not yet. But it means something.
I bought dehydrated ramen. I rode the trains. I watched the new X-Men movie. I came off my skateboard once or twice, as my muscles regained their memory after a few weeks of convalescence.
When I grew hungry again, I ate satay noodles and drank lemonade.
Coming home, I brewed chai tea in my sole remaining mug, I listened to a John Cale record, and I sat where I am now, writing on my couch, with a blanket around my shoulders.
The small rooms of my cramped apartment are full of things.
Skateboards, books, sneakers, unfinished canvases, unused notebooks. Bowls crusted with curry, backpacks and filmmaking gear.
And they’re full of dreams.
Dreams of friendships long gone.
Dreams of work never undertaken.
People whose love is now only a dream.
But some dreams do not need to be realised.
xox Joany 🍕