Guest Post: 'Happiest When I'm Dreaming'

In which former student L.T. considers what we're working so hard to accomplish, and why

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

The quarter is wrapped. I submitted final grades and sent out all the emails. It’s a bit of a melancholy moment, because in many cases, this is probably the last interaction I’ll have with many of you. Crazy to think, after the intensity of those ten weeks, that some of you will just … fade away.

That’s life. That’s writing. That’s art. That’s trying.

Others will definitely stay in touch! And to those, I salute you. This list includes, memorably, the great L.T., who I had the great pleasure of instructing this fall.

Reader, this student is an incredibly soulful, artful, odd, and amazing young human. She started writing wild stuff from day one and never let up on what feels like a great inquiry into why we act the way we do.

It doens’t feel enough to say L.T. is an artist. She definitely is. But she’s also, I think, a truly moral person, and someone who is restlessly curious about her mind and the world around her. I’m a big fan.

Here’s one of her recent essays. It’s kinda tough reading! But man is it gorgeous.

Future Nostalgia

by L.T.

I am obsessed with spaces I can’t get to. Scenes in paintings. Warmly lit second story bedrooms of the apartments I walk by. Strange caves and ancient ruins and shipwrecks. All these other lives. Space is always expanding but my piece of it stays the same.

I watched my roommate perform for Korean Culture Night and hoped nobody could see the rebellious tears slip from my eyes in the dusky theatre. Art upsets me. Watching dancers flow through life and time on stage, pale limbs like winter branches, I wish I could create something beautiful too, align myself with a talent. If I had never gotten sick of doing up my pointe shoes, starving for aesthetics, would the curtains be opening for me? Would I matter while the music played?

Thinking about this is a waste of time. I think I have moved on from believing that insecurity is the enemy. My new idea is that our impermanence carves out our flaws. We sink our claws into what we can reach. If I had more time I would find a path to follow instead of just standing here while our planet is hurtling through darkness and people are maybe living and definitely dying.

My calendar is telling me to do things and I am not doing them. Defying instructions I have laid down for myself. Wasting time because I am running out of it. This feels like a rebellion but I’m really just denying myself and it’s going to hurt me.

I don’t think I will ever be able to get out of this. I go to church every Sunday and I don’t believe in God. I bruise my spine on the pew and think about how stupid a person must be to have any sort of faith in whatever the pastor is saying. Then I think about how much stupider I must be to keep going back and back again. Sometimes I imagine moving forward, telling my dad that I don’t want to be a doctor and telling my mother that I will not be marrying a man.

But then I can feel time rushing around me and I know that whatever I can fit into my hands won’t be enough. Something settled into me when my teacher died a few months after we talked about the fig tree analogy. She said she wasn’t happy with how her life had turned out. She had wanted to be loved. Wanting wasn’t enough. I don’t know if life is something you can just pick off a tree. It has to work out. I’m not sure that it often does. My roots grow deeper into the spot where I am fixed.

There is something in wanting and not having. I am comfortable with discontentment. I am used to hurting myself. I don’t feel guilty when I lie to my mom. I stare off into my screen instead of into space and I don’t cry anymore. I wonder how I have changed these things about myself, because I wasn’t always like this. Maybe growing up made it easier for me to give up.

I was always so sure that I would make it. People always wondered how I could do well without putting effort in. And now I wish that I was used to trying. Trying feels like failing to me.

There is this weird feeling that I get and it seems like the source of everything for me. This one guy told me about some philosopher who believed everything important lied in what a person was unable to express. I wasn’t that impressed but I guess he’s right - the things I cannot get outside of me feel like they belong to me the most out of anything I have. My weird feeling is maybe like future nostalgia. Flashes of the past and hoping to be rich and imported glass and the future and being able to get inside every building I see and travel to other countries and be alone with much love more time than I have been given. This was not a good way to explain it but I don’t think there is one because it eludes me as soon as I focus on it. And I’m not saying that to seem mysterious, but I really don’t understand this feeling at all. It makes me angry that I can’t grasp it but in a way I’m glad to keep it far away. I am happiest when I'm dreaming about something and the saddest when I am coming out of it. This feeling leaves me with the impression that I have just woken up from a very strange dream and can already sense it slipping out of my memory. Maybe, like a dream, it does not mean much but it feels significant because it comes from me but I cannot really have it.

I will have to wake up eventually and study harder and keep saying that I want to be a doctor. I will find a man and pretend I like him enough to marry him and probably have kids. I will do my best to feel young again through my children and build pillow forts with them how I used to like to do and then get mad when they don’t grow up like me because then I can’t relive things the way I want to. I will go to church every Sunday and pretend to believe I am saved. I will die and disappear and then it won’t matter what I did. I keep giving things up to choose nothing.