dreaming

Sometimes I find myself dreaming of wide open spaces and running alone. The roads are empty of cars, I jaywalk with ease. Sometimes the roads are nothing but dirt and gravel and I am walking and walking and the grass is full of white flowers. I am wondering how 2017 is going to be like. Everyone says that 2016 wasn't such a good year, but I think backwards like a movie unwinding and conclude that at least for me, it was quite excellent.

I feel so settled in my bones now that I'm 22. Like I've grown to occupy just the right amount of space on this earth, like an oak tree growing solid and firm on the earth. I think about my future and the possibilities are endless. I am infinite, like Charlie says in Perks of Being a Wallflower, but not so much filled with momentary joy, as with the knowledge that I am growing and growing and the branches that are my arms, my heart, can spread to accommodate the world. One day.

One day, soon in the future, I will pack away my books and notes—the ones that have kept me dreaming in the present, of the past, of the strange, passionate men and women who lived so long ago and who inspire me with their petty jealousies and confusion about the ways of the world. And my head won't be buried in books, but in the real world affairs of men and women who are messy and just as strange and confused. I will turn to the Lord and ask him why, and he will say, "because I love them," and I still won't understand.

The other day, I was watching a Korean drama and the kind of love they acted out was shy and unclear, dishonest even, not beautiful. I told him yuck, don't let me 恋爱, he said but aren't you 练爱? And I am thinking that maybe even the messy beginnings of first love can be a means to reaching a perfect kind of love that's free and faithful and fruitful and total; of the kind he first showed me.

My sister just got married 2 weeks ago with a lot of excitement. At least, I was excited. When people ask me how the wedding went, I tell them that I enjoyed myself. I don't think that's the answer they're looking for. Maybe they want to know what the bride wore, how she behaved, did anyone cry? She wore a sari made of champagne-coloured French lace that she bought from Arab Street. The tailor look one look at the lace and refused to do anything else to it because the lace was so softly lovely. She bought a pre-made top embellished with pearls and vertical lines of diamanté. I pasted down the beads that were coming off with fabric glue. The church bells rang when they were pronounced husband and wife.

What else do I say? What else would you like to know? Details, details, we get bogged down by the details.

My memory holds on to these details though: the soft drape of cloth, the sunlight falling through the skylight, the warm glow surrounding my heart throughout mass like a halo. I teared, not just because I was so overcome with joy for her, but because you see, it was advent, and God's bride, the church, was waiting for her bridegroom to come again at Christmas. The wedding was like a fulfilment of that promise.

I remember when I was 18 and read these perplexing lines and cried because I couldn't:

     I was sleeping, but my heart was awake.
     The sound of my lover knocking!
     “Open to me, my sister, my friend,
     my dove, my perfect one!
    For my head is wet with dew,
    my hair, with the moisture of the night."

I think I can now.

In my dreams I am still walking towards a goal I cannot see. Next year, I will walk the Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James, that spans across France and Spain in the footsteps of a saint I barely know about. They ask me why, why take a flight across the ocean just to walk a 100 km on a route filled with tourists? They ask me what I want to do with my life after I graduate. And perhaps my most honest answer is I don't know. Maybe I feel compelled to walk because I dream, because it's been a dream for so long now, and once that dream becomes reality, then I know how to move on.