Vanessa's Dream - Visitor's Story

by Moudy
(Beirut, Lebanon)

Vanessa had a dream. It was always the same dream. Every time she closed her eyes to sleep, she was behind a long dark curtain, in front of her microphone stand, listening to a strange silence. She always recognized before the music started to play, and waiting for the curtain to drop and for the bright shining light light to blind her eyes. It was that moment when she felt her heart would race the pulse to the brain, leaving her in a strange euphoric trance, with a body that imitated her lips on a high stage, for all the time left before she finally woke up again, again and again.

She would open her eyes and scan her room that would never be as real as her dream, her books that would never be as interesting as the applauding audience in that strangely dark theater that she had once been to, one day in her dreams. However beautiful, all she saw and kept seeing over the years in her dreams were mere dreams and like all the dreams, they were condemned to end with sunrise.

Then, life would continue and Vanessa would go to school, just to imitate reality, or other people's reality, for people were doomed to share the knowledge of whatever surrounding reality, and forever hide all their nighttime dreams. Even after school Vanessa would obediently leave her house again to work in a small cafe as a waitress of no talent and luck. But dreams that were once hidden, would force their way out to reality to become a part of it. That's why you can see Vanessa singing whenever time stopped for her; before and after school, on her way to her work, and when she would wait her drunk father to return home before dawn. That was the reality that most of Vanessa's neighbors shared, on the ancient block of no revenues.

Of course Vanessa said something about it; she never forgot what she saw in her dreams. They may seem hidden, but dreams would never be forgotten! For as far as she might be concerned, Vanessa never failed to tell her parents that she wanted to sing. But she always confronted reality when she accepted her father telling her that no girl with her little luck and nothingness would ever achieve anything in her life. Her mother was dead before she could ever think plainly about the subject. Since then, Vanessa was hiding not only her dreams, but also her true reality, behind a mask of fake ambitions and lost efforts.

Vanessa had a dream... but she no longer had it in her possession for it became the possession of other men's dogma, failure. However, what men seem to forget, was the only thing that made an actual sense. It was really hard for them to recognize it because it was so simple it couldn't wear a mask to increase its greatness. Life had its way of turning our heads upside down, when we least expect it to happen. Life brought dreams out of the brain's closet so that Vanessa one day started to sing in front of her apartment.

She raised her voice so loud that you couldn't recognize the people staring at her or shouting at her to mind her own business... Her voice was loud, her voice was full of sadness, her clothes were sheets and a belt, but while she was singing, a young man from a record company passed next to her, came back to her and started to stare at her singing, with a small cold smile on his face.

Vanessa opened her eyes, but now she wasn't inside a theater but in front of New York in central park! It wasn't a dream for on the crowds, she saw the loving, but now very sick, look of her father's eyes.