Life is a wish, made over and over and over again.

I steal this line from a monologue in Midnight Mass that made me cry.

I steal it because because it is the perfect summation of the endless succession of dreams that life is. You wish and you wish and you wish. Every year they put that cake in front of you and they light the candles and you close your eyes and you make a wish. I used to wish for pink starburst and the ability to fly. Then I wished to grow up. I wished for New York. I wished for love. They stacked on top of one another, year after year, and together, they all added up to something. Something like me.

THE END OF ANOTHER SUMMER

I suppose it is right on time that I am reflecting on the whole of my existence, for what else does one do come the end of another summer.

The abrupt collision of August and September has always felt profound to me.

It is a point of the year, more so than any other, where I feel change the most. I feel the pulse of time itself, beating against my eardrums relentlessly. Nostalgia finds me. Nostalgia finds me like a lantern in the dark and it is everything I have ever loved, flickering right before me, reminding me that it is not just this summer that has gone—but every summer. All the summers of my life drip onto my forehead like raindrops, falling at a velocity that is so, utterly, indifferent to me.

They slide off and form puddles at my feet. I want to jump into them like a child with green froggy rain boots. I had green froggy rain boots as a kid and I never had any use for them because it was California. There was simply not enough rain and there was definitely not yet enough life. Not to jump in, not like that. I wore them to stomp in my mother’s rose garden instead.

PAST LIVES

Now, I am surrounded by puddles, portals into past lives. There is me, walking on the beach as a little girl, clutching a wish in each palm. I am opening my hands and dropping them into the ocean like little fish, telling them to come back to me one day. Come back and show me how it all turned out. I am touching the ocean when my mother’s voice calls me and I go. I go home. I go to school. I go do my homework and I feel the sun on my face every Saturday morning as my dad makes apple oat pancakes and then— it is all just a dream. It is all just something that falls into my consciousness for one, single, fleeting moment.

In another I am walking through a parking lot, somewhere near Los Angeles, and the sun has just gone down.

The sky is ephemerally pink. The whole world is drenched in hues of strawberry and orange cream soda. I think I have gone somewhere else. I think that this is an hour of time that maybe doesn’t count. The world has stopped to marvel at itself for just one moment. I feel suspended, looking at the world like I have never seen it before. There is a faint smell of gasoline, and Santa Ana winds are blowing through. I am barely fourteen years old. I don’t remember anything else. Only that. Only that the world felt a way I seemed to know it would never feel like again.

For then, someone pokes a straw through the stratosphere and sucks up every last drop of that strawberry and orange cream soda. The world finds it’s footing again. The clocks tick back on. Cars resume their rat race on the highway. Places everyone. Someone calls my name, and I am gone.

A DREAM

I open my eyes and I am here. It is September. I am in New York. Life is puddling all around me. It is collecting itself in organized pools around my ankles and when I look closely, I can see them. All the wishes I dropped like little fish into the ocean as a child. They came back. They are all right here. I am them and they are me and I forgot. I forgot that life is just a dream that we are always waking up too soon from. Five more minutes. Just five more.

We drift back down to earth, our atoms occupying little humans living out their little lives once more. Making coffee, going to work, riding the train, all while utterly indifferent to the dream we are constantly mistaking for something so much more mundane.

Life is just a trip through our own unconsciousness as it collides and congeals with everyone else’s. For a short time, for a mere collection of moments, we are alive.

And I want so many more moments.

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