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Dear anonymous person,

Several autumns have passed since I’ve buried my heart.

Even as I gaze into the small brook from where I reside, the sky looks dull, the stream doesn’t flow, and the trees hunch over like 12 tired soldiers who’ve lost their fire.

I feel nothing, and yet, even as the smell of decay rots in the air, something stirs quietly in the distance. Although my heart is now a long-forgotten and barely audible hum in the background of some blurry, bizarre, and colorless dream, there is an elegy waiting to be sung before winter settles.

So, dear, though these words do not travel from my fingers to the paper with ease as I sit here and write this final farewell, I’ve let the frost settle in my veins, just enough for a drop to flow and amalgamate into an ocean between us. One day, on my side of the earth, the sun will dry up the river and an eternal spring will prevail.

Stranger, dear cold and expressionless stranger, the dust has long settled in my eyes. Even your feeble face disintegrates whenever I fall below consciousness and try, in vain, to grasp it in memory. Your name is barely remembered, and yet, those old gramophone records still drone in the distance at times, as though stuck in an autopilot mode.

They tell the story of a “you” and a “me,” which was only an illusion after all—a mere smokescreen and a figment of a clever and cunning imagination. You see, the mind is called the creative sense for a reason, and it is capable of weaving some extraordinary tales to serve its own agenda. Just as the heart beats and circulates blood, the lungs breathe, and the stomach digests, the mind creates what it thinks is a world, along with a story about everything and everyone in it. “You,” I’ve come to realize, were just that: a mere creation of a mind that perceives a world of particulars and nothing more than that. Instead of a “you” and a “me,” there was only ever emptiness dancing its own molecular dance.

So, the moment has finally come to let the thought of “you” go, once and for all.

Yes, dream-character, I am finally waking up now. Dreams no longer have such a painstaking hold on me. Besides, the red-hot fantasy-like atmosphere eventually descended into a pit-black nightmare that no longer inspires awareness as the memory-trace that it is.

So, with that, a deeper realization dawns: there is truly nothing to let go of, after all. Upon awakening, the landscape comes alive with clarity and a sense of renewal permeates my experience.

The dream served a purpose. The nightmare, alone, knocked me out of a deep state of unconsciousness.

Now, as I look out my window, a river flows through a valley, and the leaves sway in the warm, sweet breeze. Everywhere I go, I am home within myself, frolicking around joyfully like a child on God’s infinite playground—utterly reborn, and utterly in love. This time, I am as sharp as a tack in my revived state—free from all illusion. This time, I only dream while awake.

Thank you for being a catalyst for this rebirth.

Farewell, dream character. Farewell, indeed.

~

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