Oprah never told me dreams can shift, or that there can be more than just the one.

Maybe I just wasn’t listening too busy running. 

Maybe I had to let my dreams catch up. 

Maybe the dreamer in me plain wore out.

Disoriented and dizzy, from having my head in the clouds, my feet grew impatient and heavy. 

Ground yourself.

Travel, adventure, freedom, and glasshouses were waiting for me on a bluff.

That was the one dream I could count on, envision the bluffs, and the seashore, while the rose gold sun shone every morning.

I tried to forget my dreams, replace them with love and loneliness. 

They coexist, love, and loneliness, like the tears and giggles of an overtired two-year-old child.

Love, and loneliness.

They must be the first thing I cling to while dreaming.

Life has been filled with heart-swelling, shattering, terrifying, easy-breezy, goose-bump alive love.

It has also been soured, spliced, charred, and rotten to the core.

Love wracked with grief, hatred, and disappointment.

The heart is a muscle, it cannot possibly feel. 

Yet, it does. 

It feels too much.

I seek out the scorching sun, crescent moon, silly stars, and gravity to keep me grounded. 

The sea moves through me. 

The glasshouse is the unfiltered, and utterly exposed words I share so freely. 

I am not less than one dream or another. 

I am not less loved; even on the days, I forget.

How sick I’ve been.

When I forget to love myself.

It has not been easy, my middle, it’s been a fractured, chaotic mess.

Perhaps I need to accept it, this waking dream, cut myself some slack.

Forget Oprah, I’m not fifteen anymore. 

My dreams have shifted.

They must be simpler, quieter, and not half as screaming mad. 

A home, inside my heart, that’s what’s been missing all along. 

Not the physical dwelling perhaps, although a glasshouse on a beach sounds like heaven.

Sensory memories.I was five. 

I dreamed of the ocean, the sand tickling my feet, and the sun warming my bones as I twirled and danced without a care in the world.

I have always felt safest, surrounded by water. 

I had never been to a beach, but perhaps in some other world, an alternate dimension, a different time, that dream is my reality.

I’ve written books and books about that beach, love, and loneliness.

It seems I cannot escape it, the dreams, the gypsy traveler in me.

Dear Oprah, “it’s okay, I forgive you. You’re busy enough.”

I’ll keep my dreams alive, like love, and loneliness.

Making peace with them both.Readily accessible in my front pocket, not the back.

Dreams change.

So can I. 

Loving my loneliness, and all the beauty that awaits stepping outside glasshouses.

Into the sun.

“There are a thousand communicable ways to talk love, there is not one fitting word to explain away empty.” – Jacqueline Cioffa