The Dreams I Buried Are Knocking on My Door

Is it time to get the shovel out?

There's a particular kind of grief that doesn't get talked about much. It's not the grief of losing someone. It's the quiet, private grief of letting go of a dream.

You know the kind. The one you held onto for years, maybe decades, before life made it clear it just wasn't going to happen. And so you did what people do - you processed it, you made peace with it, you told yourself a story about how this chapter was simply closed. You built your life around the absence of that thing, and eventually it stopped hurting. You moved on.

And then somehow, impossibly the idea of it shows back up, in an even more glorious form.

I've been sitting with this lately, and I honestly don't quite have the words for it yet. Because the feelings are tangled up in each other: wonder and disbelief, hope and skepticism, joy and this strange, protective instinct to not let myself get too excited. Like I'm guarding a bruise I forgot was there.

There's something almost surreal about watching a door open that you spent years convincing yourself was permanently sealed. You did the work. You grieved it properly. You reorganized your whole inner landscape around its absence. And now it's like the universe didn't get the memo.

Is this even real? That's the question I keep circling back to.

Because part of me wants to run toward it. And another part of me, the part that remembers the grief, wants to stand very still and not make any sudden movements. Like if I get too hopeful, too fast, something will break the spell. And that may have already happened.

I think what's hard is that I no longer know what to trust. The dream itself feels fragile, like something made of light, beautiful but maybe not entirely solid. And I'm not the same person who first had that dream. Years have passed. I've changed. Would I even want the same version of it?

I don't know yet. And I think that's okay.

What I do know is that I'm sitting with it differently than I would have years ago. Less grasping. More watching. A kind of cautious wonder instead of frantic hope. Curious. Maybe that's what all those years actually gave me, not the death of the dream, but a softer way of holding it when it came back.

So here I am. Surprised. Uncertain. A little bit in awe of how life can still catch you completely off guard.

And I'm letting that be enough.