Hopeful Glow

This piece is a bit different from the short fiction I had written before. I am going to describe a dream that I had a few nights ago in as much detail as I can remember. Before I do so, I feel some real-world context is required. I normally do not talk about my personal life, but I feel it necessary in this case to establish what brought up this dream. See, I have been fighting mental exhaustion for the past month. My significant other Ally (whom I have mentioned multiple times in the past) had to leave her job, partly due to mental burnout and partly to care for her ailing mother. (No, it is not COVID.) With that lost income, I have been scrambling to keep the house's finances in control. Fortunately, we are breaking even but only just. I have been trying to find new sources of income since then, but my desperation had increased as the reserve savings decreased. Ally kept trying to tell me that things will work themselves out, but my conscious mind did not want to process that. I guess my unconscious mind had to take over one night...

I was sitting at the dining room table going over the bills. Along with the usual stuff like the electricity and the Internet, there were things like emergency car repairs, medication for Ally's mother, and various magazine subscriptions that I have not had in years yet still sent bills. Every time I thought that I reached the last bill, three more seemed to show up. I looked over at the spreadsheet I set up for the house finances, and my jaw dropped. My ending balance dropped by three-hundred dollars since the last time that I looked at it two minutes prior.

I went to the refrigerator to grab a soda, but there was nothing inside but a few condiments. Dispirited, I slumped back to my laptop at the kitchen table, took another look, and silently screamed. My balance had dropped by another two-hundred despite the fact that I was not even at the table. In a panic, I ran through my house, searching for any extra money. I flipped the mattress of my bed over. I tore apart the sofa cushions in the living room and den. I opened the completely empty coin jar and turned it over, hoping that something would magically fall out. After scouring every dresser drawer, I returned to the kitchen table in defeat... only to discover another two-hundred fifty dropped off my balance in the intervening time. It was suddenly sitting at less than it would cost to gas up one of the cars. On top of that, more bills had suddenly appeared on the table when I distinctly remembered that I had gone through them all already.

Defeated, I walked out the back door and into the backyard. It was dusk, and the stars had started to appear. My fatigue somehow pushed me to go to the pear tree at the back of my property. (Seriously, I do actually have a pear tree in my backyard. There's a picture of it above this paragraph.) I picked a pear off of one of the lower limbs and lied down in the grass while eating it. Time seemed to speed up as nightfall took mere minutes instead of hours. I could only stare up into the night sky as I quietly begged anyone and everyone for help.

A set of stars appeared to shine more brightly than the others. It was the constellation of Taurus, the bull. It didn't make sense to me as, in my area of the world, Taurus would not be visible in the summer. I knew it tended to mean rebirth or renewal, but that didn't seem to fit. Nevertheless, all the other stars seemed to dim as Aldebaran, the Pleiades, and the other stars that make up Taurus only brightened. I was confused but also more at peace than I had been.

Suddenly, Taurus was not in my view. Instead, from out of nowhere, I was looking into the bright eyes of Ally. She was smiling a quiet smile that told me that she had no cares at all. I started to get up, but she held up a finger, signaling for me to stop and lie back down. Once I had done so, she reached into a bag that was slung over her shoulder and pulled out a couple of marigold blooms. I started to ask where she got them since marigolds normally could not grow in our area, but she shushed me. She knelt down and placed one marigold on my forehead and one on my chest. She then stood up, and I could see the stars again.

The constellation Taurus was glowing more brightly than was natural, and I felt warmth on the places where Ally set the marigolds. In fact, I angled my eyes up and saw that the bloom on my head was starting to glow, as well. I started to hear quiet music in my mind, peaceful tunes like the ending of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, one of my favorite classical pieces. As the glow from both the stars and the flowers continued to envelope me, my alarm woke me up.

That dream put me at some degree of peace. While it was not a solution to the problems that haunted me when I was awake, it instilled in me a sense of hope that Ally was trying to impart before. As for the Challenge prompts appearing in the dream, it must have been because I was struggling to come up with stories for them, and my dreams have provided ideas for me in the past.

Thank you for reading this piece. Hope can be hard to hold when times are tough. I can have a lot of trouble when those times come up. If you wish to speak with me, here's my Twitter. Please take care of yourselves.