Sleeping Away the Future
Ana’s eyes cracked open once more to the mocking sound of the alarm clock at 7:00 am. This clock that would begin her daily battle against time, the unforgiving reminder of how much she had lost as she continued to waste her freshman year of high school.
Her mother, Eleanor, had yelled at her the night before about her C average, about her lack of discipline and care for her education, for the future that would claim her sooner than she knew.
“You disappoint me, Ana,” Eleanor said quietly after long minutes of berating her. “You don’t recognize your potential and you never try to be a winner anymore.”
Any other kid would erupt with anguish to have their parents bruise the air with such words, but Ana knew her mother thought it every moment she was with her. It was bound to be said eventually.
And this made her weary. The present exhausted her with its constant demands to grow up, to stop daydreaming and dedicating invaluable hours to art and poetry — the only “potential” she cared for.
Ana rose from bed to darkness as faint sounds of tires rolling over the rain dampened streets pierced the silence. The clock across the room continued to buzz louder, the time between each sound narrowing, just like the demands of her mother, of her teachers and friends and The College Board.
Your life is not a book.
Dreaming is for kids.
Don’t give me that look; I just want to help you find your purpose!
You were meant to be awake for more than just 8 hours a day!
Rise and begin again.
What a lost cause the act of trying was. For she loved sleep; she only stagnated more when she was awake.
Everything was worse when she was awake. Another dead leaf in the wind she always was, the blistering winds of the present tugging at the last remains of her stem.
The present was monotonous, demanding her to prepare for a future that was unpredictable, uncertain as the next earthquake. Like all the kids she knew, it was the biggest scare. Unlike them, sleep was her refuge. It was the only constant thing her life, the predictable phenomenon that she could depend on. Even as she would still fail the exam she labored over studying for, even as she would fail time and time again, even as her mother’s disappointment in her would endure like a regrettable tattoo, there was always the bed.
If there wasn’t a bed, there was the couch and the newspaper to drape herself in.
If there wasn’t a couch, there was the ground, where she would lie for what she constantly wished was an eternity.
“Did your will to succeed in this hour drift away out the window like your perfect GPA? I do not see it resting in peace, Ana,”
Ana, sprawled out on the couch with her closed Moleskine and pen in her lap, looked up at her mother.
I just want to help you, her eyes screamed.
Think of how badly he would have wanted to see you triumph, her eyes whispered.
“This is your education! You only get one chance, only so many opportunities…” Ana heard as she walked away.
It was a lot different from what Ana used to hear when she was little, when every little thing she did lit up her mother’s world, when she was encouraged to dream.
Most of all, when her father was still around.
If only he were here now…
Stop.
She thought about him too often. When she did, she couldn’t sleep without Restoril.
Her early days were peppered with days in which she only saw him, Phillip, while her mother was out working. Though he was often pitied for not ever having a job himself, he paid that no attention. He and Ana had this special bond with he wouldn’t sacrifice for the world. It was one that not even his wife was fully aware of, like siblings with their own language and inside jokes.
When he had taught her to learn to write when she was two, he had said, “You see each of these letters, here? They’re not just squiggles and lines to copy.
“You know, a person long ago dreamt of a world where people could write to each other and be understood. He saw letters like and the power they have.
“If it weren’t for dreams and sleep and thoughts, I can’t say we would have had the same kind of writing — or any,” he told Ana.
It was the beginning of what started out as a game. When she could string words into sentences fairly well, Phillip challenged her to not just follow but find her dreams through every line and squiggle.
“But I always forget my dreams the moment I wake up,” she had admitted. “How am I supposed to write them down?”
“Dreams are where we get our purpose. They prompt us to begin again tomorrow after a trying yesterday,” he explained. “All the good dreams never leave our minds. But you must not let them slip from your grasp like a fish out of water at first.”
He didn’t reprimand her for sleeping in and he never let her get away with staying up late.
It wasn’t every dream that she could capture, for the nightmares were best left undocumented. But more dreams were written about than neglected.
As Ana grew older, her dream journal grew thick and worn from pencils scratching prolifically at the pages. The first journal was done halfway through the third grade.
When he had finished reading the first finished volume, Phillip told her to begin another one immediately, to never stop documenting her dreams.
“But they’re so boring and unexciting,” Ana protested modestly. “It’s just a waste of paper.”
“That’s what every artist thinks of his or her own dreams until something beautiful is made out of them,” he replied.
“I’m not an artist — ”
“Nonsense,” he interjected passionately. “It’s simply a matter of taking things from life and making it beautiful.”
“How do I do that?” she asked.
The next day, he returned from the local stationery shop with a large, elegant leather-bound Moleskine notebook and handed it to her.
“Compile your dreams into a story — better yet, a novel,” he told her. “Don’t tell me you can’t.”
The Moleskine wasn’t cheap and that night, Eleanor returned from work and demanded that he finally get a job, for there was no reason for him to stay at home anymore.
“And we really need the money. Ana is old enough to stay alone at home after school,” she said.
At first he refused to apply for any positions that weren’t under the familiar title of fatherhood. However, he could not help but see that Ana was becoming less of the young, uncertain child in need of guidance and more of the young lady looking towards her future. And future was forever stronger than fiction. It wasn’t long before he relented.
Three months followed in uncomfortable solitude as there was no one to accompany Ana in her daunting creative endeavors. Alone, she was wrapped in the same thick, grey storm clouds the sky hid behind. One late night, as Ana stared at the intimidating white pages of her journal, flummoxed over how she was supposed to codify a plot and characters from poorly written dreams, a car slid along the rain and ice-slicked street as her father was walking the crosswalk home from his high paying dead end job.
The driver scrambled to slam the brakes but he had fumbled for control too long.
Moments later, a single word had begun the first chapter of Ana’s story. An idea for a novel was born and she had no idea what would come of it.
Meanwhile, the car had hit Phillip on that snowy night in the middle of the crosswalk.
Now the future was waiting for Ana to chase it, whatever it entailed. It was expected, and her father would have expected it too, for the smart girl he believed she was.
While grief cracked Eleanor into pieces, Ana had tied a noose around her grief as soon as she could and carried it without the slightest dip in her grades, her novel neglected and her journal empty except for a few bad poems.
But she could not even give herself the fleeting satisfaction of academic excellence anymore; she could not earnestly study for any test or quiz without being overcome with apathy and sadness for what could have been.
And with the closing of the Moleskine that catastrophic night, her childhood came to a conclusion.
For the world was blissfully unaware of her grief, blissfully unaware of the misery the present brought that only made the future worse. Its students carry on to fill in their Scantrons and compete for the most reputable universities to take them all.
There were still days — too many to count — when her grief broke free and drained her of all her energy. Her dreams were fully aware of the grievous loss, the misunderstanding. The blissful realm of sleep was the only one generous enough to give her and Phillip a second chance after everyone else was impatiently telling her to stop dreaming and catch up with reality.
Under Ana’s bed were three more dream journals, full and collecting dust after years of being untouched, unread.
She dragged herself out of bed to stop the alarm, took out her first journal, opened it.
She fell back asleep with it in her arms under the covers.
In her dream, her aging father was asking about her progress on the novel he’d told her to write all those years ago.
