Daydreams and Songs and Things...

Next to me on my desk is my open literature book, it’s open pages a stark reminder of how behind I am. “The Invisible Man” looks up at me from its stagnant position on my desk, my yellow highlighter still wedged in the binding. “What’s the point?” is the only question I can seem to ask myself.

Just another week, just another night that ends like so many before it. All I can think about is the possibility of summer, of its hot hands wrapped around those three months away from this place. Those three months that can either be a disaster or a relief, time will tell I suppose. For now I’m just grateful that I’m nothing like the Invisible man, or at least what I know of him from the prologue, because that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

This whole college thing can get so monotonous sometimes, but don’t get me wrong I love my school. Anyway…it’s these times when I reach for a sketchbook, or a fanfiction or my guitar. My poor guitar, well, my poor guitars. Sitting in their cases in my house 250 miles away, unloved.

There are certain songs that really get to me, songs that imbed themselves in my conscious and subconscious, whose chords resonate with some unnamed force within me. Songs that give birth to daydreams, daydreams that create a world that I can control, a reality that I want, the possibility of something impossible.

When I put my headphones in, when I hear those first few chords of Flyleaf’s “There For You” I can picture myself holding that long lost guitar. Sliding my fingers along the wooden neck, along the cool chords. “I wanna be there for you, someone you can come to,” echoing through the room, echoing through me. And when the song begins its descent into completion I always, mentally, change the last verse to “I want you to be there for me, someone who cares for me.”

And the song ends. And in my daydreams he is behind me, and I sense his presence and turn around. In my daydream I melt into his arms, I stop being alone, I have someone whose there for me. He tells me that he’s always loved me, that I am like a magnet that draws him to me, that I am remarkable, and that he is there for me always. He kisses me and then the daydream ends.

And it’s back to English assignments and group projects and going through every motion that eventually leads me to bed. I turn on the soft light by my bed, put on my oversized black jersey and climb into my sky blue sheets. The light snaps off and I’m left looking out into the dark. Into my room, which isn’t really mine. Holding onto daydreams, which aren’t really real. Waiting to get that guitar back in my hands, it’s slick black gloss reflecting a real room, a real home.

Perhaps the reason I find art and writing and playing so intoxicating is because it is what you make it. You are in control, it reflects your vision and desires and hopes. It is not warped by luck or fate or others, it is all you. I think I like unrealistic realities, escaping from all that holds me down. But the ironic twist of fate is that all those realities that hurt find their way back into whatever it is your doing. Find their way into your art, or your writing, or your playing. And I guess that’s all right, because without those daydreams and outlets stark realities would just get…starker.

So I lie awake and think all of this over. Crumbs of consumed songs still crunching beneath my thoughts, especially “There for You,” and Paramore’s “All I wanted.” They hang in the darkness, they hum in the silence, and they bring me back to my useless and forbidden daydreams and leak into my night dreams.

The only word I can think of to describe how I sleep is “kamikaze.” A twisted heap of limbs and pillows is how I sleep. And before I doze off I always wonder what my dreams will hold, traces of songs still laced into my last conscious thoughts.