Reverie

by Ryan La Sala

“If you look at most female archetypes—the mother, the virgin, the whore—their power comes from their relation to men. But not the Witch. The Witch derives her power from nature. She calls forth her dreams with spells and incantations. With poetry. And I think that’s why we are frightened of them. What’s scarier to the world of men than a woman limited only by her imagination?”

Since his grandmother’s funeral, he realized that when people tell stories about the dead, they create life in reverse. What’s remembered about a person becomes what was real about them after they’re gone.

Sometimes reveries—and dreams for that matter—are more real to a person than the reality they serve to distract from.

He thought of the gloomy, covert life so many queer people were forced to live as they found one another in a time and a world that could not adjust to them. He thought of secret meetings and secret names, and the secret sadness that grew like mold in the humidity of a life kept closed.

Here it was again: the feelings people had for the person he used to be, bruised with loss and turned to anger with who he was now.

Dreams can be parasites we sacrifice ourselves to. Dreams can be monstrous, beautiful things incubated in misery and hatched by spite. Or dreams can be the artifacts we excavate to discover who we really are.

And, he reminded himself, saving the world was not usually a matter of want.

Their past was an ache between them.