Dreams Are Dangerous

In between high school graduation and university matriculation I had a dream. That in four years I would ascend a stage 4.0, molecular biology degree in hand, six-figure job in pocket. Wife and daughter greeting me on the way down the steps. The dream was given to me by all the systems that raised me. Parents, school, authority figures, ecosystem, concrete. In all their rushing to get this rare black boy to fulfill their vision they forgot something. They forgot to ask me what I thought about how the wind moved or how I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what sirens and pillows had to do with each other or What I thought my mother’s last breath looked like, Some days I say quiet, others maybe shouts billowed up to the ceiling like smoke and skin banged against all four walls of my grandparents house. I imagine it was raucous and violent but nothing could be louder than the sound of my eyes following an assigned novel to the end or my hand guiding a pencil to a dance of endless pages of notes. My family vowed to make a student out of me if it killed me.