Every day for three years I have stared into a box full of possibilities, technicolor promises that make the world outside it look bleak and uninviting. Added saturation over images of the real world outside that when I turn around to peer through the window, I wonder how anything could ever have appeared bright to me.

Last night I peered out that window and I swear, against the backdrop of bleackness, I saw the phoenix, dressed in flames, fly past. I stuck my head out into the cool night to see better, and it had gone, but the feeling remained that perhaps what I was looking for was close at hand. A peeling away of my outer layers, jaded to hell; a movement toward what I might want to do if I ever had the energy or confidence or support, outside the promise box.

The world is dreams inside of dreams. Every night mine are different and every day I wake up drained, as if the night before was only nightmares. But this morning, after the phoenix, I felt that the nightmares were in my waking hours as I labored away at someone else’s dream, for someone else’s purpose and joy, sacrificing my own for fear of the unknown and risky.

And this morning in the light of day, I threw on a black down and a rainbow hairpin and played the piano poorly, just relishing the noise coming from my own fingertips, a noise I was making for none other than my own.

As I played the world turned warm, the sunlight turned up, stars danced through the daylit sky in tehcnnicolors. I felt I could brave and desert, any ocean, fly on wings of my own design through the sky, through the stars.