I sat down to write this entry on Thursday night, anticipating that I’d finish it on Friday afternoon before CPL’s viewing of the Lion King. That is, until three o’clock Friday, when I found myself standing outside Columbia Presbyterian’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program (CPEP) facility. The hallway was my home that day– outside patient rooms, ER wings, lobbies, and CPEP. The hallway left many hours and much space to stand, stare, and think. I watched as patients and scrubs moved down their days. I thought about my friend behind the hallway– and I dreamed of a day where she wouldn’t dream of becoming dust.

When the world strips us of all we thought we knew, its easy to think that there’s nothing left. But as Langston Hughes– someone who had so much taken from him– writes, we still have our dreams. And they are “not for sale.”

DREAM DUST
BY LANGSTON HUGHES

Gather out of star-dust
Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust,
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust
Not for sale.

I’m still a little hazy from the day to write cohesively about my thoughts on this poem, so I decided to write poem of my own instead:

A DAY SHE DREAMS

She’s the one who never listens
To the girl with open ears
She’s the one who swears she fine
To the lady who can’t lie
She says –she’s the one who’s waiting to die
To the woman who lives

Lives out here
With her dreams wrapped ‘round
Her shoelaces
That she wants to steal
She’ll share her plastic soaked slice of bread
Unseasoned rice
And chicken with a spoon
She’ll go on dreaming into the lonely lights
Of brick walled basements
And roaming lonely souls

She’s the one dreaming of a day without dreams
Without the splinters of life digging into her hips
Into her wrists
Into the folds of her tired skin
But she’s the one
Too tired of this waking life to say goodnight to her dreams

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