The Dreams Left Behind

I woke to a canopy of trees and twinkling leaves and the memories I held most dear. I wished they could’ve been real.

I shivered in the cool morning air, wearing only my Giselle costume, light and airy with the long flowing skirt, point shoes laced perfectly up my legs. The night before, I had twirled on stage, the Prima Ballerina in a production of Giselle. How I loved to be her and float like a ghost across the stage, weightlessly lifted by my partner, spinning balanced on the tips of my toes.

I woke to that all crumbled away, as if ripped from a magical dream back into real life, if I could call it that. I didn’t question, I knew what had happened. And my heart ached for her.

I followed the stream, fighting tears. I had to find the others, I knew they would be here somewhere. We would all need closure, need to know what her life was really like, need to thank her for giving us a purpose and lovely lives of our own while they lasted.

But time had become sticky and stretchy and held little meaning anymore, not there. I spent my wandering moments thinking of my ballets, the many bows, the bouquets of flowers, the sore nights and sorer mornings. What would I miss most, maybe the music pouring through me as I turned? Sewing the ribbons onto my point shoes every week, getting them just right? Knowing that this life of mine was truly a gift, that I was lucky to have each moment? But I choked on a sob because every beautiful thing that I had I knew she had never felt, for if she had, I would not be here.

After an endless wandering day, I found the first Amanda sitting happily under a tree. I wanted to collapse next to her, hear her story, her variation of the truth. My feet ached from my tight point shoes, but I knew we had to keep going, find the others. And what a gift to have someone beside me.

Maybe six or seven years old, this little Amanda wore a lilac ballgown dress with bunches of tulle and a tiara sitting on her shiny curls. The two of us looked like a pair of trick-or-treaters in our costumes. It made me smile. “Hi there.”

She looked up at me with her dark eyes. “I am waiting for my prince.”

I thought it best to be gentle with her because of her age, yet I knew she would understand. “Amanda? You need to come with me. We have to find the others.”

“But my prince - ”

“He’s not real… And neither are we.”

She swallowed and then gave a deflating sigh. Beyond her childish physical appearance, I could feel she had lived a life the same as me. Only a princess dream often lives younger than the rest and dies young.

I held Princess Amanda’s hand as we continued the search. She told me of her story: she lived in a castle and had many gowns in every shade of purple imaginable. She was betrothed to a handsome young prince, their wedding planned for her eighteenth birthday, a day she would never really have. Her voice choked up a bit when she got to that part, so I squeezed her hand a bit more. She swished her dress to the side, watching the sparkles in the sun.

It wasn’t long until we found another sister. Maybe five years older than me, Nurse Amanda wore scrubs, a stethoscope, and sensible shoes. Tears staining her face, she grabbed us in a hug. “I was lost, I couldn’t find you. I can’t believe she’s gone!”

Nurse Amanda was a talker. As the three of us walked hand in hand, she told us about her life and the people she had helped, the lives she had saved. When Princess Amanda got tired, we took turns carrying her.

By the time night fell again, our group had grown. There was Graduate Amanda, Author Amanda, Wife Amanda, and Mother Amanda. That night we huddled together to keep warm, telling stories of her life and what it could have been like. But we didn’t feel quite complete. There were silences in our souls and a heaviness unspoken.

Mother Amanda put her hand on a swollen belly that would never give her a real baby. “I feel like there is one of us missing. Do you all feel it?”

The next morning, we went in search of her, Amanda’s last dream. It was Princess Amanda who found her, a distant figure sitting in a stream. I had my hopes of who she would be, and we all spoke in whispers of our found sister, hoping for the best as we hurried towards her. The last dream was built from the last bit of life. I hoped she would be old, maybe a Grandmother. What a wonderful last dream that would be, to be wishing for more family, for a legacy.

Wife Amanda was first to get in the stream, hiking her white gown up around her hips to keep it dry. Her lace covered veil trailed in the water behind her, catching the glittering sun. I wished the real Amanda would have had the chance to wear it, to be a bride and love a man so completely she wouldn’t live without him, and to create the family she had always wanted, turning into Mother Amanda along the way. But we were the unfulfilled dreams, not the real parts of her life. As we drew closer to our last sister, I hoped with all my heart for something good.

As soon as I saw her, I knew who she was. She was Safe Amanda. What a heartbreaking last wish.

Safe Amanda looked up at us through a puffy purple eye, blood on her lip and a ripped dress. She was thin, not a strong thin like me, but a ghostly thin reminding me of the Wilis, the haunted spirits from Giselle that lived in torment. I had never danced that part, I didn’t know how it felt. The dead and the gone and the hurt.

This was the real Amanda, or as close as any of us could get. Seeing her made the rest of us solemn. One by one we sat in the stream, wet fabric melded together in the water, melting together Amanda’s biggest dreams: a wedding dress, scrubs, a maternity romper, a princess gown, a ballet tutu, a graduation robe, and a torn rag brown with blood that would never be stolen again.

What had prompted this last dream? What caused the bruises? There were some things that we knew about our existences. Some knowledge we were given when we were first hoped for, when Amanda had wished for us. If her dream came true for her life, she would become us, and we would become her. If not, we would exist in a reality all our own until her death. Once we were thrown into the forest, we had all immediately known it was over. The real Amanda had died and we were all that was left, the things she didn’t get to be. She wasn’t a princess or a ballerina. She wasn’t a graduate or a nurse. More crushingly, she was never a wife or mother, never known the love that comes with that. And most horribly still, she had never been safe, the one thing nobody should have to hope for yet so many do.

We grieved for the part of her that we all were. The happy pieces of her soul. We sat in the stream and recounted our individual lives and it felt as though something was healed, a great big wound that was finally closed. Her dreams would last forever somewhere or everywhere or maybe nowhere at all.