Sandcastle Fantasies

Sandcastles meticulously constructed, smoothened by cautious palms and silent fingers. Moats of liquidly filthy perfection, tainted ocean water dispersing to the surrounding landscape. Drawbridge of drowned driftwood, nestled to levelled perfection. Limp kelp crawls as ivy does, sprawled along the walls patched together with individually miniscule fragments. Jagged, smooth, pocketed pebbles stand in for windows lining halls. One of the tiered towers, with absent-minded dips littering its walls, slouches in the orange-gold light.

Shells mark the path I found myself drifting over when I met him. Or her. Or nobody at all. A densely dispersed fog clouds my memories as suffocatingly as it shrouded my vision that fateful morning. When the sand finds itself reunited with its lover once more, the waves lavishing hurried, drenched kisses drenched upon it. Even as the envious moon, with unfaltering certainty, drags the water back to its blackened confines, the sand lays there. Waiting. Knowing with comforting certainty that the water will find itself in its arms once more. I craved that.

A foggy morning, when the ocean slinked back to its unwillful prison marked the day I met somebody who would change my life. Truthfully, little was special in that sense; I could hardly exchange an unintentional, fleeting glance with a stranger without my mind ambling to wonder what sort of life they lived. Nebulas of unspoken, hardly regulated thoughts, bursting to life and death all the same in sloppy clashes from any moment to the next. What sort of starry thoughts twinkled in their ever-shifting eyes? Brown eyes flashing in an eclipse of gold in the sun, or darkened eyes growing dimmer in the shade, or green eyes wavering with depths of foresting life, or blue eyes inviting you to drift aimlessly in the sea. Rings of gold or gray, rays of hazel or yellow, eyes shift gracelessly and fluidly as we inevitably do. 

Forgive my thoughtless mind, inconsiderately fluttering from sparking moments of thought to the next with disregard for the story at hand. He or she or they changing my life may not seem to hold much weight when strangers, burdened by the same conflicts in a unique concoction as us all, touch my life in their own way. But he or she or they shifted my world in a way no other had.

I lived my life in a spectral sort of way. My mind dismissed the world, displeased by its incongruencies with the artfully crafted castles and forests and clouds and skies it crafted itself. Castles of stone, bearing the mark of skilled masons, with cobbled roads and bustling life and sheer panes and ever-serious guards were but teetering, temperamental, temporary globs of sand. My hands craved dipping, scarred stone, my soul craved vulnerably illuminating conversation and companionship, my feet craved jaggedly smooth rocks to glide over in mossy creeks. The world offered loose, shapeless sand, and incessantly babbling, temporary people, and unstably dipping ground instead. 

And so my mind retreated to worlds of befriended, mythical creatures, and magic beyond comprehension, and friendship without an expiration date. How could they call me empty-headed when limitless universes devoid of rules filled most of my waking moments?

But he or she or they changed that.

I suppose in the way you cannot sustain movement of your limbs on the mere thought of food, you cannot soak in the vividness of life when your mind seals itself into a world of its own making. Because soberly possessive princes and soothingly caring princesses cannot reject you when they are of your own making. In the countless lives I lived in countless galaxies, I always happened upon someone to love. I always, in a conveniently effortless way, obtained love from the object of my affections. Of course, I had to keep the fantasies realistic; fights occurred, problems manifested, but love conquered all. 

Just as my imagination opposed reality in other aspects, because my carefully guarded desires remained so much safer locked behind a door, my imagination latched onto my unexposed hopeless romanticism as well.

He or she or they was nothing like that. Nothing at all like the different fragments of people conjured throughout my lifetime.

He or she or they made me fall in love with reality. 

Spikes of discomfort assaulted me throughout the first meeting on softened sand and dewy coolness and calming waves. For all my commitment to recalling the names and faces and stories and lives of my crafted characters, I couldn’t tell you what we even spoke about. Surely painfully uncomfortable tidbits of the weather, or off-handed remarks about the time of day were exchanged. To what end, until we ended up where we were, I cannot seem to recall. Perhaps the fog from that morning suppresses it.

He or she or they gradually permeated my life in a pleasantly unnoticeable way. One morning, the unopened messages and sheets containing their smell and easy affection seemed unthinkable to have ever been anything but a constant in my life. A contained, familiar sort of comfort. Something I wish I could have captured in a jar as easily as those fireflies on a hazy summer night, or as easily recalled as the beautifully inhuman face of my first imagined love. 

My mind begrudgingly released some of its ill-tempered hold on my thoughts, allowing me to gasp my first breath of unfiltered reality. Fantasy no longer governed my life. While no dragons crashed into the town hall, and no magic manifested itself in a fiery burst in my palms, I could hardly believe reality offered so many delightfully confusing emotions and experiences. Quests and castles and unicorns and princes and thieves and knights drifted into oblivion, like toys long abandoned to collect dust. I found myself no longer needing the comfort of somewhere else, of being someone else.

I fell in love with him or her or they in a painfully slow burn, sweetly, gently, affectionately. I could hardly believe such a person could exist. And to find me, a ghost daring to call itself a human, wandering aimlessly from one day to the next, worthy of such love and attention and affection? Unthinkable.

I grew to see sandcastles as sandcastles; imperfections, unimportant. Reality contained delightfully unexpected moments, and dreadfully draining ones too. But it all felt so much more vivid and encompassing than my isolated fantasies ever did.

I desperately wish I could remember him or her or them. Maybe they never really existed. Maybe my mind found mere fantasies unacceptable, and dredged up some new one to release itself back to reality. 

Whatever the case, I fell in love with reality.

And that is far more than I ever hoped to dream for myself.