#FlashFictionMagic: Collector of dreams

Grace paged through the thick notebook on the dining room table, leaning closer every now and then to make sense of her mother’s teenage handwriting. Grace had never realized her mom had been the kind of fourteen-year-old who dotted her Is with hearts, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Still, young Imogen’s journal entries were fascinating.

The best ones described her dreams for the future. She wanted to be a dancer, but if that didn’t work out, a psychologist or a zoologist. She wanted to see all fifty states before she turned 50, to read all the books in the library’s young adult section, and to meet the president.

Most important to Grace were Imogen’s dreams for her family. I hope I have a lot of kids, she wrote, but I definitely want a girl first. Grace loved that her mother had wanted her for so long before she was born. I know I’m not going to marry Lincoln, another page read. Was that a boyfriend or a crush? Grace wondered. But I do want to fall in love with someone with floppy hair and dreamy eyes and get married young.

Grace peered into the kitchen where Dad was starting dinner. He had his summer haircut right now, but it was usually floppy. She wasn’t sure about the eyes. They looked more or less like Grace’s own eyes. But she didn’t think her mom would have married someone who fit only half of her requirements, so she decided that to some people Dad had dreamy eyes. And they had been really young when they got married.

Closing the notebook, Grace suddenly had an idea. Obviously not all of her mom’s dreams had come true. She hadn’t lived long enough to launch a career or a major travel itinerary, or even to give Grace any siblings. But she had managed to marry the right kind of man, and to have a little girl, and those were major accomplishments. What if Grace started collecting her own dreams in a notebook? That way, whether she lived to be 25 or 95, she’d have a record of what she wanted out of life, and she could always refer back to it. With high school just weeks away, this seemed like the perfect time to start.

Up in her bedroom, she dug around in her desk drawer until she found a blank hardback book and a fancy purple pen. She opened to the first page, and carefully printed the words “dream collection” across the middle. After a thoughtful pause, she dotted the I with a heart. On the next page, she wrote the date, and then made her first entry. My biggest dreams right now are to ask a boy to dance with me at the Back to School Ball, to get a pair of orange cats, to make the basketball team, and - She took another long pause here, weighing the consequences of putting her heart’s desire in writing. For years, this dream had gotten her in trouble. She had been scolded for hiding in bushes, warned about hinting around, punished for interfering, and yet this one desire persisted in her soul as though it belonged there. Even now, after Dad said that he and Fern had tried to make it work and had decided they could only ever be friends, Grace couldn’t quite let it go. To write it down would be to admit that she still held out hope, but to omit it would be to lie to herself, both now, and in the future when she reread her own words. Deciding she would hide this notebook in the depths of her closet so that this would be a secret she shared only with herself, Grace determinedly resumed writing -and for my dad and Fern to get married. She knew better than to be superstitious, but this was more like a prayer. And if it was as meant to be as she felt, even if no one else could bring her two favorite adults together, she knew God would find a way. Closing the notebook, she stowed the pen in her drawer, then tossed her dream collection into the corner behind her sweatshirts with a renewed sense of hope.