The Prologue of a Perennial Dream

I wish I could say there was something special the day that it happened, the day that my life completely changed, but it was a perfectly normal day. The date was October 11th. I had woken up at 6:00, taken a lukewarm shower, brushed my teeth, gotten dressed in my usual jeans and hoodie, made myself toast with butter for breakfast, and set out for my job at the grocery store on my bike.

We had 22 customers that day, and I knew all of them; they were various people from across the town. We only had a few hundred people, so it was easy to keep track of everyone. The work day passed just like any other, the only notable thing being that Mr. Berner had severed half of his left index finger. I didn’t bother asking how. He owned and worked our local farm and operated heavy machinery daily, but accidents were inevitable, as the man had little care for proper safety procedures. Off the top of my head I could think of ten different ways the accident could've happened.

My shift seemed to take an eternity, but when I finished, it felt like it had been seconds ago that I had been biking to the store.

After work, I went to the library and took out 4 books. I hadn’t heard of any of them, but I thought they would keep me occupied. I had read through over fifteen percent of our library’s contents, and I hoped to make it to twenty percent by the end of the year. Not that those numbers were particularly impressive when you considered the size of our library—hardly large enough to be called one. I expected to finish every book in there in no more than three or four years. I was an avid reader, and I usually read at least a book a day. They engrossed me like nothing else. If I wasn't at work, I was almost certainly reading.

As I was biking home, I stopped to give a quick wave to my mom and dad, who were out in the schoolyard for the kids' recess. My parents both worked for the school as teachers, and I knew they enjoyed their job, despite the difficulties it came with.

Our school only had fifteen kids, between ages five and fourteen. There was one other teacher, and the three of them each handled different age groups. My mom was assigned to the seven youngest kids, and my dad had the middle four. Mrs. Orreau handled the eldest four, since she was the most well educated, with a passing-level understanding of most disciplines, from Biology to Psychology. She wasn't out with the kids for recess, since at that age recess wasn't really a normal thing anymore.

I felt somewhat bad for my parents when I thought about the stress that must come with their job. I knew that teaching groups that small was tricky, since they would all move at completely different levels. With the kids in each group having an age range of multiple years, the curriculum ended up in ruins as there was no clear way to move along. Things became even more complicated when a new student would enroll every year or so, usually at roughly the age of four or five. Then they would have to catch that kid up with the basics they had covered and hope that they could keep up. Thankfully, the things they learned at that age were broad, with little successive material that needed an understanding of previous concepts. They had to re-teach half of the content every year anyways, since the kids forgot so much over the summer.

After saying hello to my parents, I biked another couple minutes until I arrived at our house. It was one of the nicer houses in town, and one of the only ones with two stories. We even had a small basement. It was a brick house, with a squarish shape; a large stretch of poison ivy ran along the ride side as viewed from the road, stretching all the way up from the dirt to the roof. It covered up the living room window, along with one of the two of my room. We had tried chopping it down a couple times, but it grew back in less than a week, at a pace I thought could only be supernatural. My dad had jokingly suggested we burn it down, but it was far too healthy, and it didn't even catch on fire when we tried holding a match under it.

Once I got home and made myself a sandwich and chips, I read the entire rest of the day, finishing three of the four books. They weren't particularly amazing, but despite that, I still enjoyed reading them. It was exceedingly rare for me to find a book that I didn't enjoy. I read fantasy, sci-fi, biographies, poetry, short stories, manga, novels, comics; if it was interesting I would read it, regardless of genre or format. Many of my favorites I had reread countless times, never getting bored of them. Some books are timeless, and I still learn and notice new things whenever I reread them. Those kinds of books are my favorites. The three books I read tonight definitely weren't going to be reread though. I knew they were the types of book that I would forget about in a few weeks. Despite that, they still provided me with brief enjoyment, and an escapade into a world far more interesting than my own. After putting down the books on my desk and brushing my teeth, I went to bed at 10:00, lying down in the same clothes I wore during the day and letting my imagination take me away to my dreams.

I love my dreams. Every night, being able to escape into a world of my own imagination, unbounded by any person or anything, doing things that would never be possible for me in the real world. Dreams are my heaven and my haven. There were times when I would wish that I could spend my whole life dreaming, living in fantastical lands where I could escape the dull monotony of my life.

That night, that became more true than I ever thought possible.