Fragile Dreams

My wife and I dreamed that we would buy a new home, a better situation for life and health, and a new start into the next stages of life. But that dream vanished.

There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish… it was so fragile.

– Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator

I feel like our dream was too audacious, too ridiculous, too ambitious, and ultimately, too fragile. We’ve been denied funding for our new home, something to do with income. I don’t pretend to know the ins-and-outs of the process or the legalities, I just know that a man that I’ve never actually met called this evening saying that my wife and I cannot go forward with the purchase of what we had finally begun to think of as our new home.

And we are closing in a week on the sale of the house we are currently living in, a deal we cannot stop, and probably honestly, still wouldn’t stop if we could. There is only a path forward, not backward, even if we cannot see where that path leads or what lies along the road.

But now we need a place to live, and we only have three weeks to find that place for the two of us and our two dogs. Three weeks and not one because our buyer gave us a free two weeks of rent-back. What once seemed a luxury now seems a life line, cast into the surging seas of the unknown when we didn’t know we’d need it.

We are devastated, of course. Angry, sad, bewildered, and grasping for answers. Our well-meaning real estate agent reminded us that “all things work together for good” but that is little comfort in our time of uncertainty. My wife said it seemed like someone had died. Maybe it was our nascent dream, so close to coalescing, evaporating in the harsh heat of reality. I don’t know.

I am so tired of fragile dreams. I’ve lost so many dreams in my thirty-seven years. I thought for once I would gain something. This was to be more than a house, a structure. It was going to be a home, a place to settle down and put out roots, and cement me where I wouldn’t have to leave. Ever since I was sixteen, and honestly for years before then, I’ve been on the move, always on the move. From the home I still dream of as home when I close my eyes at night, to Florida to Papua New Guinea to New York to Pennsylvania to Wisconsin to Texas. From dorm to dorm at college; from college to college. From family to family for Christmas. From life and wife to life and wife. Now to move again and to know I have to move again after that. I am so tired of fragile dreams.

What do we do now? For me, I force my feet ahead and stagger into the weekend in a completely different mood than I thought I’d be experiencing. I think I’ll take this weekend and just exist. I can pick up the business of living on Monday. “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof” the Good Book says. I guess that is true enough. I just know it will be awhile before I dare to whisper again, and that is what really hurts.