✧･ﾟ: I asked for help remembering my dreams before I went to sleep. I didn’t sleep well—but one stayed with me. :✧
🏠 I dreamed I was at Justin’s mom’s house.
I haven’t seen or heard from Justin in nearly two decades. He was the best friend of my first crush, Kyle. We all worked together. Justin was kind, artistic, and flirted like it was breathing—but I always thought he was too good for me. I was too hung up on Kyle, too tangled in insecurity, to believe someone like Justin could truly want me.
🎨 I still remember one night in real life—
We went tagging walls after work. (Yes, graffiti. Yes, I was awful at it.) I’d planned to stay at Kyle’s, but he bailed. Justin offered me a place to crash instead. He didn’t live with his parents at the time, so I’ve never actually seen his mom’s house. We shared a bed, got a little handsy, and I remember feeling a confusing cocktail of desire, guilt, and shame. I’d lied to my parents. I still wanted Kyle. And yet… Justin sensed all of these things, and I was thankful I didn’t have to verbalize my internal torture. Instead, he chose to meet my vulnerability and inner turmoil in kind. He handed me a poem he’d written—splattered with his own blood. Even then, I knew it meant something more than just words. He was handing me the deepest most wounded parts of him. Trusting me with his vulnerability. The final lines of his poem haunt me to this day:
Years later, I still have it.
Or rather, I have my version.
🖋️ Sunshine & Blue Sky Monday
By Justin, circa 2003
So this is love?
And this is a beautiful day
Why don’t you understand?
It’s like divorce in a happy home
Translate
Have love but feel alone
That’s the me I’ve known
Then don’t you see
What’s a sunshine and blue sky Monday?
It gets ruined anyway
But tell me to live in it
Tell a salt water fish to live in fresh water
Will I sink or swim?
So this is me
And this is a beautiful day
From what I understand
It’s like bloodshed on white carpet
The sickest thing I could say
And kill a ruined sunshine and blue sky Monday.
Even after all this time, I remember those last 3 lines almost by heart. I remember the feeling of them. The poem read like a cry against all he’d been told love should be. Clearly, his experience of love had fallen painfully short.
Back then, we all used a shared online forum to post poetry and half-formed thoughts. I copied his words down into my journal, but I made it mine—scribbled the lines across a page with a bright yellow sun in one corner and streaks of blue sky in oil pastel. Terrible art, honestly. But such a different energy.
His version was raw, literal, bleeding.
Mine was soft, messy, trying to bring light to what hurt.
I think I was trying to save it.
Or soften it.
Or maybe I just couldn’t hold how dark it really was.
I wanted so badly to fix it—to erase the ache in his heart—that I splashed bright colors over his pain and called it care.
✈️ In the dream, we were grown. At his mom’s house. It was small, cozy, worn but homey. My mom might’ve been there too.
Justin and I were about to leave for a trip—heading to the airport, passports in hand, buzzing with excitement. I don’t know where we were going—only that it felt big. Overseas, maybe. A beginning.
🕰️ I was flitting around the house doing last-minute things. I told him I’d go home to shower before we left, but time was slipping. He gently mentioned it a few times. I could see his concern that we’d miss our flight. I remember thinking: He doesn’t know this about me yet—how I always cut things close.
But I didn’t shrink from it.
I thought, I accept that about me. I get why it’s hard for him.
I skipped the shower.
🚙 He pulled the car around—some boxy navy-blue thing, maybe a Jeep or a Subaru—and whipped it into the driveway dramatically. Trying to impress me. Trying to say hurry. I smiled silently: Wow, okay, Mr. Drama. It was sweet.
I hugged my daughters goodbye. They were trying not to cry. They are so damn brave and understanding. I told them they’d be okay with Grandma, they’d have fun, they’d be safe. But I felt that tug—that ache all mothers feel—of guilt and longing. Still, I left.
His kids were there too, a little older than mine, hopping out of the car with their bags while it was still moving.
We were all in motion. No pause. No time to question. Just go.
We drove off toward the airport. I recall feeling happy, at peace, and excited. I thought about the book I’d packed for plane and how I knew Justin would ask about it and be curious. It was a spiritually based book of some sort- maybe the one I’d bought in real life the day before- Being Ram Dass. I thought about how nice it was that he showed interest and that we could have conversations with meaning.
We never got to our destination.
I woke up before the journey began.
🌓 Reflection
There’s something in this dream about missed connections—not just romantically, though that thread was there. It felt like a long-awaited departure from who I used to be. In the dream I was confident, comfortable, and self-assured. I wasn’t chasing Justin’s approval. I believed that I was worthy of his love, and I wasn’t interested in changing myself to be accepted.
Maybe Justin isn’t the point.
Maybe he’s just a symbol—for the versions of me I didn’t believe were worthy.
The parts I thought were too much. Too little. Too late.
He represents the life paths I never chose, the risks I didn’t take.
The quiet, comforting masculine energy I didn’t yet know how to receive.
I can’t help reflecting on Justin’s poem and how the dream prompted my remembrance. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I not only copied and saved the poem, but that I was able to find it more than 20 years later. Clearly the younger version of me didn’t know how to hold someone else’s darkness without painting over it. A coping mechanism, no doubt. I wasn’t strong enough yet to hold all that pain—so I painted it a different hue and believed that was healing.
⌛ There’s also something here about time.
How I always push it. How I trust myself to make it, even when others get nervous.
But in the dream, I didn’t shape-shift or people-please.
I just accepted me. And I held compassion for how my pacing might feel on the other end.
👶🏼👧🏽 The kids are deeply symbolic too.
They are the ones I leave behind to chase something I couldn’t quite name.
That part aches.
Because growth often asks us to loosen our grip.
Even on the people, places, and identities we love the most.
🔮 Dream Diary Prompt
Sometimes our dreams show us the roads we didn’t take.
What “what if” do you carry with you, and how does it shape who you are now?What part of your younger self are you still getting to know?
What would you say to them if you could take that trip back?
💬 Drop your reflections in the comments below. I love reading what your dreams stir up, too.
Cosmic Tea 