San Francisco Dream
We were in the ocean. It was dark out, but the reflection of the stars and the moon were like night lights in the water. All five of us drifted with the waves on our raft, a gentle ebbing up and down. Suddenly you crack a smile and push me in. Everything else followed. We were people who didn’t know the name of oxygen. We spun and splashed in the midnight sea timelessly. I could touch the sandy bottom of the ocean floor with my toes, and I could swim all the way up into another atmosphere. We were laughing at god knows what, but whatever it was, it was the funniest thing any of us could imagine. We talked through locks of wet hair stuck to our cheeks and made faces over the rhythms of the drifting waves. I fell in love with the water, the stars, the smiles that none of us could wipe off. I fell in love with being alive.

And then I was in San Francisco. I saw the morning fog hug the Golden Gate Bridge, and I was telling the stories of the day before to a distant friend. It was a dream within a dream, that night, because even there, in the Golden State, I couldn’t grasp the euphoria of the night before. A dream within a dream. The dirt beneath my feet was too real for my liking, as it stuck to the tips of my converse. There was a longing for the sea in my stomach, the kind the sun felt to just reach through the misty fog. One that made me want to sink deeper into unconsciousness.

My back hurt and my room was gently lit by the morning sun outside. There was still an hour until my alarm should go off, but I was too heavy to sink back into sleep. I was too real to feel alive.
[]
['Short Story', 'San Francisco', 'Life', 'Fiction', 'Dreams']