The Promise of a New Tomorrow

The first rays of sun glide slowly upwards from the horizon. The dull blue scenery is waking up slowly from its restless sleep. Waves hit the sand heavily as if even the sea is struggling to face the new day. I sit on my chair in the cool balcony, have been for a while. Every joint and bone in my body aches, they ache for the miracle and yearn for the youth. I woke up before the sun again and wait for it to come with a promise of new tomorrow. 

In my head I still feel like me, like I have been throughout all adulthood. The sparkle of the youth has never died inside of me, although the body is failing me little by little. Even if the face that I see reflecting from the glass window that doesn’t represent the person that resides in my skin anymore, I still feel like I’ve felt ever since I was eighteen. 
I still remember the restless warm nights spent around the dying fire on the beach and all the guilty pleasures we indulged ourselves in. Only recently I’ve understood all the old people I’ve ever met in my lifetime, pushed aside and told that they’d never understand. Why wouldn’t they? We all experienced our nights of guilty pleasures around the dying fire, skinny dipping in the freezing cold waves, drinking beer till the sun comes up.. 
Youth, and beauty that comes with it, is a dying art and some rush to get by it quickly, the others jump right into the adulthood with the rut and the responsibilities. All of the people, like myself, tend to only understand the most important things in life when they are taken away from us or when we are in the brink of losing them. One of those important things is the youth, the beauty of all the possibilities and the dreams, your dreams that await to be fulfilled.
 
Why is it that I woke up to life only after children left home? Postponed my long lost dreams till the very day the youngest packed up and left to explore the world in her red minivan. Why is it that I was brave enough to start to fulfil my secret desires only after my house was just an empty nest?
I never dreamed about spending my empty days of retirement in a golf club or a yacht club or any type of club. I always dreamed about spending quality time with my wife. With whom I spent my life from the teenage years: we rode our bikes to the shows around the town and sinked into the art scene, made love under the stars on our worn out blanket with aztec print and maybe had a joint or two on our way home. 
What happened to us? We graduated and went to universities, enjoyed the student life for a few years and didn’t worry about the money or the material world. We explored and we lived, but then on the last year of our studies the free spirited youth came to a sudden halt and we grew up. All of a sudden all the material things were an issue, the money and all kinds of expectations started creeping into our lives. Pulling us under the dark surface of adulthood I never thought would be our life. 

With money came the struggling to pay our bills and her once so brightly burning desire in arts first dimmed down and then died away completely. She had to put off her dreams and pursue a career elsewhere, where the money would come in - from a job she could do but she didn’t love. 
Her love of a lifetime sank deep under our own feet kicking the dark water when we were trying not to sink under before the rays of the next mornings sun. 
She gave up on her dreams. First not entirely but started to postpone them as I did. I, a struggling poet dressed in a suit of a corporate executive. 
After the first year of the affair with corporate life I stopped writing completely. Didn’t have time or the energy to think creatively: I had to think positively or effectively.
My intention was to write again when the first baby arrived in our lives, to start anew and draw inspiration from the wonders of the parenthood. The day when the baby arrived with ten fingers and toes was one of the happiest of my life, but the pen and paper remained hidden in the depths of my drawer.

I postponed my own happiness away, alongside with my wife, and we told everyone that our secured life in the suburbs made us happy. We did so with an ache behind our tense smiles, because we never dreamed of our children to grow up in this environment, we wanted them to become aware young citizens of the world, not children of suburban dreams.

But what actually made us happy, truly and genuinely, for the first time in years and years was a couples retreat paid for us by our children where we were able to express our forgotten desires in art. That was an emotionally loaded week for me and secretly I cried for us both and what the adulthood had done to our young creative souls. But it wasn’t the life itself that was to blame for it, it was us. We were once too naive to oversee the society’s expectations of us and we tripped and fell in the trap of something that I prefer to call ‘standard living’. Life made easy, or easier, and more comfortable: career, decent pay, wife, three children, car, house in the suburbs and a dog. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a life like that but if the price you pay is your own dreams it is not a life for you. 
The happiest week in my life came with the bitter realisation that the life in someone else's shoes had gone too far and my dream of becoming a poet was long gone. I guess my wife realised the same thing since upon the day of our departure she threw all her drawings in the fireplace of the victorian mansion where the retreat was held. I never asked why and she never told me, but we both new. In silence we got in our SUV and drove away and left the last bits of our childhood dreams rising to the sky from the chimney and colouring the bright blue with shades of grey behind our backs. 

After that I decided to concentrate on what I would do when I retired. Days went on and children grew and the older we got the more we started to plan our vacations across the Europe in our restored minivan. The minivan that was yet to be bought and restored and holidays would take place when our children grew up and started a life of their own.
We had fun as a family together over the golden years and we did our fair share of traveling in the meantime, while planning our future trips: just the two of us like newly weds exploring the different cities like we used to explore our hometown in our teens. 
Before the middle one of our children moved out my wife had begun to show odd symptoms of losing track of time and place. It didn’t take long after our child had left the nest when she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers, which progressed fast. Over the few years I watched the last rays of light in her eyes dim away and eventually lost the love of my life and the person I most cared for in this whole entire world. After months of getting lost in her suburban dream she had to be placed in a nursing home because of radical behavioural changes and in the last few months of her life she didn’t react to anything at all anymore. There she laid in her bed staring to nothingness, in silent and immobile. My once so beautiful wife and her restless creative spirit was tied down by her failing body after all the years of her suppressed dreams. This was how life thanked her for the sacrifices she had made for the sake of our survival in the concrete jungle, but yet again the life was not to be blamed for it.

Then there was only me and my youngest child, but soon she left too with the minivan saved for our trips across Europe. I was the last one of our little family who accommodated our suburban dream once filled with laughter and joy, built on the sands of time. Losing my wife left me with emptiness deep in my heart. I got comfort from the thought that now she was finally free of all of this and maybe she had found a place to rest and be who she was set out to be. From that thought I drew my last dose of inspiration and wrote her a poem on a white piece of paper I put in the casket with her on the day of her burial.

The years went on and I found a new love to stand beside me, one who never understood me quite as well as my wife did, but who was loving and caring and made me feel less hollow.

Over the years I have thought that if this is just part of a journey and we are put here to learn, the biggest lesson there is, is to hold onto our dreams and never give in. Because only you know what truly makes you happy. But no matter how often I tell this to the young people who come and go when I need to be taken care for they just smile and agree with me, look at me as if they didn’t hear a word I just said. When I can see in so many eyes the suppressed desires and postponed dreams as the struggling artists and dancers and writers have disguised themselves as nurses and caretakers because they too, as we had in our time, have fallen straight in the depths of adulthood.

They too have found out, as we did, that it is too scary to leave the forced upon universal comfort zone and dive in the waves head first and wait for them to carry you.

To trust in the promise of ‘everything will be alright’ is one of the hardest things there is to do, but as long as I can see the sun there is a promise of new tomorrow and as long as there is tomorrow there is a place for the hidden dreams to come true.