"All a Dream" by Cadence Sinclair

It was just another day. Another Tuesday was passing as casually as a spring rain shower, the ones that last no more than a blink of an eye, the ones that sometimes you never even notice because they come and go so swiftly. This particular Tuesday was as unremarkable as any other, neither harmful nor harmless. Or so it seemed.

I was riding my bike along this wooded path in the late afternoon, deep enough in that the sun’s intense rays could only faintly penetrate, and I was oddly calm. I even began humming gently, nearly imperceptibly, feeling compelled by the serenity surrounding me and my pale blue bike. The pleasant airiness that coursed through my veins could have been pinned to a multitude of things, such as finally landing that highly coveted job at the movie theater, earning a halfway-decent midyear report card, and becoming an aunt to a beautiful baby named Alice, but in retrospect, it had mostly to do with this fuzzy but distinct premonition in my brain that something amazing would soon unfold.

Forward, forward, curve, curve: my legs propelled the bicycle along the path without any direction; they just somehow knew exactly where to go. I’d never traveled this route prior to then, so while my body surged deeper and deeper within the woods, my mind was blind to all sense of direction. Yet I never willed myself to halt and return to the familiarity of my neighborhood’s beloved Goodman’s Creek or the comforting busyness of the forest’s roadside outskirts. I was lured by an unspeakably powerful something- the problem was that this “something” was unknown to me at the time.

Forward, forward, curve, curve: my legs were aching and head was spinning. Suddenly I caught a glimpse of a grand, stunningly ornate house ahead to the right, exquisitely plagued with both abandonment and time’s wearing effects. Its neighbors were mere trees, but that wasn’t anything I’d ever complain about. Off of my bike immediately without any moment of fear or hesitation, I made a beeline straight to the rectangular hole that must have contained a door and peered into a house not truly empty but rather filled this eerie energy of endlessly preserved memories- everywhere, everywhere. But then those memories collided with the essence of me, purely, unmistakably me, in a mirror that hung above a grand piano with a crack straight down the middle. I faced the reflection head-on and the crack began to fuse together into an image that still ultimately bore a mightily heroic scar.

I realized that the most beautiful things are speckled with flaws, adorned with cracks, but then glossed over with a humble sense of confidence, gently thrumming a heartbeat that belongs not to any single person but to the universe in its mysterious entirety.

My body jolted to a disorienting start. I’d been sleeping. It was all a dream. The house was my past, the mirror was my present state of being, and the wooded path beyond the entrance was my sparkling, open-ended future.