A Warm And Wonderful Morning

One fantastic thing about this apartment, the mornings.

I mean I'd never even been a morning person even once in my life and even I am prone to admit that the mornings here are something else and I think it's mostly down to light. That's a factor that I never quite got the grasp on, but when I first moved in the difference was pronounced. I mean in my old home, my parents home, I'd moved from my childhood bedroom down into the basement in an effort to claim more space. Spent three years down there with blackout curtains on the window and hadn't gotten a single good nights rest but still I didn't put the pieces together until I got here. It took sleeping here to realize the value in having actual sunlight falling on you when you wake up and once that clicked for me there was no way I was going back.

This room. This apartment. This bed. This view.

The big window open at the back of the room directly across from the foot of my bed with the blinds that were deliberately tilted to let sunlight in while blocking the view from the street below.

So that when I woke it was blanketed in sunglight just as much as anything else. A cover of it lying heavy on me as I squirmed beneath the soft covers and felt them slip and pull over my too too sensitive skin. A delight of sensations alighting on me and making me shiver, a small smile playing on my lips.

The warmth of the sun dove deep beneath the skin of me. It relaxed my muscles and drew my attention into them until it was all that I could focus on. My mind pulled inward and fixated on the sensations running through me, the thrill of it making me delight in the mere sensations of being me.

God I don't know that I'd ever felt more alive in my whole life. Certainly I'd never felt this fully, never felt my body quite like this.

All of it was so very strange to me but above it all this unerring strangeness, the oddness of my dream.

I didn't often dream and if I did they were always murky and inconsistent and mercifully short. My dreams were oftentimes more brief flashes of emotions and situations rather than the dream I'd had last night.

Because last night I'd dreamed a whole damn life. Can you imagine that?

I'd gone from the first day of school through years of it and then years of work afterwards. I'd lived and worked and... well I wish I could say that I'd loved too but I hadn't. I'd lost nothing but gained nothing and I've spent all those years drifting purposelessly and aimlessly and then...

Then a trip to a familiar fair and the memory of a wish and something more. A trip back and a second chance and a warning, maybe, not to waste the chance I had in front of me.

Of course it was all insanity. It was all just my crazy anxiety riddled brain making up all of it. I'd had a few humiliating moments in my first day in this school but it didn't mean that I was set down a path of self-destruction. It didn't mean that I was doomed to mediocrity. All my mind was doing, when it gave those dreams to me, was tell me that I should be more careful in the future, was tell me that I should be more open.

There was value in that lesson, even if it was one my own brain taught me.

No, I wasn't going to waste this chance. I was going to get up out of bed and shower and stretch and head out to campus and I was going to be a new man but most importantly I was going to be a man because that was what I was born as and mystical old women in tents couldn't change that. That was pure folly and fancy.

"That was all just a dream," I said, in a voice that was too high and too light and too feminine to be mine.

And my eyes shot open and I realized that oh god, a dream it most certainly wasn't.

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