Alex & Joan

New Dream (alex)

                       The past week was too surreal for your own sanity. It felt too good to be true that you can't help but question the universe if this is its way of euphemizing the worse that's yet to come. It seemed that all those times when your lucky stars have failed to work for you, they've been saving up to this week.

                       While studying in college, you have, in some way, developed a liking to photography. It started out as a hobby, just you taking portraits of your friends and the places you've traveled into and eventually, it had grown to be something you can't live without. So after graduating in culinary arts, you sought yourself a job in a fine dining restaurant (thanks to your university's connections) and after saving for a couple of months, splurged yourself with your own fancy camera. It wasn't of the latest model but it would suffice for your amateur photography exploits.

                        Aside from being a chef, you worked as a freelance photographer just leisurely catering to anyone who wanted portraits of themselves and you gained quite an audience from doing so. And so you decided to put up your own website and took the craft more seriously. And just this week, someone who works for a fashion magazine took notice of your website and has offered you to do a fashion editorial with his team. Clearly, photography didn't come off as one of your dreams but now as the opportunity greets you like the spring winds at the end of winter, you reckoned it wasn't so bad.

                         Then, just the other day as you were scuffling through piles of castoff books at a local bookshop, you bumped into Joan. You never saw it coming – meeting her again in such a casual manner and the impact she has made in your life, in general. She was the dream you never thought you needed, but you can't deny that she was also the dream that got away. And now that you've come face to face with her again, the paranoia and anxieties you've coped with when she left you are now clawing at your chest, but more than anything, there was hope – one that outshines all the ghosts from your past and honestly? It wasn't so bad. It wasn't so bad if you had to go through every one of them all over again... she was worth it after all.