Dreamstate

Some aspirations become pickled with age and end up tasting like someone's grandmother's white socks from the 1980s that have turned a peculiar orange color. So we tuck them away in forgotten drawers that shut into the inner folds of a void, and then we instead buy stockings for our corporate dinner parties that no one wanted to go to. Some aspirations remain fresh and crisp in our refrigerator, but braces or a retainer tell us we can't devour them, much as we crave the sense of purpose they offered up. There is the rare aspiration, often the runt of the litter, that presents itself so many times at the end of the hall taunting us that we have no choice but to play tag according to its rules until we win. There is that rare aspiration that grows up.

For me, type 1: fashion design. Needles take too much blood. Type 2: writing. Surrounded by revolutionaries who always find the right words, the desire has been drained from me, leaving only a thin layer of condensation from over the years. Type 3, today: a band. An honest-to-god, people-will-listen band with a dorky name and too many violins. But, today, inserted into my mom's folk band as percussionist (via the cup song), the dreams were thin and worn and easily torn, disintegrating in my hand as I tried to pull them in. "Now," J5 instructed professionally, "just do that second part a little quieter, so it'll go over the strings. Balance. There ya go." I stared up at my mother, expectantly puckering up to her shining flute. "Twice, then the pickup."

My fingers rested precariously on the edge of the blue plastic cup. The hopes of my foot-tapping and soul-searching and song-singing seemed to become outdated, idiotic. But, with obligation one is a slave to their word, and I methodically began to tap and the surface of the cup. Instantly, the rhythm flowed into my hands as though injected by one of those oh-so-dangerous needles, infiltrating my floodgates and taking over my head, tugging at my bones to rock to and fro, and I felt, ever-so-slightly, the pick-up lift me off my feet and rise. Clutching the hand of my dream with one hand and my cup with the other, the three of us laughed and sung and then we grew up.