Your Dreams Through Glass

The slow drifting of the clouds, the sky’s reflection upon the water. These were the only things that felt consistent. Clouds were never meant to leave the sky, and the sky was never meant to leave the water.

I was never meant to leave home.

Almost everything I could tell you about that day would be fabricated, an illusion as the perceived cotton-like softness of the clouds, the blue hue of the water. 

Now I cling onto fabric I never thought I’d wear before, thick and fluffy, yet leaving me cold nonetheless. It wasn’t the cold, it wasn’t the frozen rain and frost unable to go through the window. It’s that nothing was as it should be, everything changed from its original state.

One of my homes used to be cold too. I remember this story much better, calling my great-aunt, my nonna, and crying, the clouds and ocean outside the window of the plane mocking me.

The clouds and the ocean were one with each other and with the sky. The water could evaporate, condense, freeze, thaw, and it will always find a way to carry the sky within itself, as a reflection or as an unstable yet calm being among the stars. There was never the need nor the existence of distance between them.

My first home, like the stars, like storm surges, was nothing but heat and noise, lively and vibrant and terrifying. I’ve no real clouds to be amongst it, no sun for motivation either.

I too went to different physical states, indefinitely stuck in one that promises freedom,union.

I haven’t seen my family in 6 years because I am not allowed.

There have been glass ceilings presented before me, the doors to take me to my dreams, to the world of dreams that I may or may not have seen through the window of a plane framing the only consistency in the life of a ten year old struggling through 3 different states.

I saw the dreams through the glass ceilings easily enough, a sky filled with possibilities as if they were stars, each a promise of everything I could accomplish and overcome in this new world where change is its constant.

However, this was my final state, and all I was met with here was cold and frozen rain and frost. There was no sun for me to rise, to evaporate and go beyond the glass, to finally meet my destined one, my only goal. The sky filled with stars.

There were moments where it seemed the glass shattered. My first stories in English, accompanied with my last stories in Italian and Spanish. My first grades in science and computer lab instead of ESL. My first presentations and readings in front of a classroom of vapor. My first win in a poetry competition. My first friends who could only speak to me in the language my frozen form had to desperately learn.

Yet the glass was always there, this state never truly felt like home. My bursts of hope were nothing but stars that turned to dust, tired of waiting beyond my reach, and peppered themselves onto myhair and arms, trying to have the same effect as fairy dust.

Time is meant to heal things, though I am less certain if it heats them. People I know have not looked through the window of a plane for 10 years, 20 years. Some became lucky and were separated from that view of the sky for only 2 or 3.

I may never be able to be a cloud again, but I felt the instability all the same. A chaos, a storm and lightning, sometimes a hurricane, sometimes a tsunami. My first home may never melt my heart anymore, may never give rise to feelings of belonging, but neither does the second, and neither does this poor attempt at a third. I was left frozen in a conundrum of undesirable choices, and the star dust simply wasn’t enough. There had to be a way out, to look through that window once more, even if not physically. To dream as one was supposed to, with fairies and shapeshifters, not with food and education and medicine, without care or recollection of the outside world.

That was when I realized how easily glass could break when you space out, and your head is in the clouds.

Share this story