Last night I dreamed...

Last night I dreamed of Kenya. Not the kind of dream where any specific action happens, it was more just random images of places that came up, and I walked around them...It was empty everywhere I went. But still...I first was in my room. I sat up on my bed, looked around and smiled, taking in the comfortable clutter that was always on my desk and bookshelf. My bookshelf was full of all my books(full and overflowing, I always had too many books) and half of them were stacked up in the most improper fashion, but I always knew where books were. Because I read them over and over again. I viewed them as I would an old friend... *sigh* Then I walked out my door and found myself in my theatre back in Kenya. Terrible stage, poorly designed...Orange walls and dark green chairs...Shallow stage, poor acoustics, and yet it was so clear, so vivid in my mind...and it was my place. I stepped down onto the stage and looked down to see the hole we drilled through the floor for The Happiest Millionaire, and then, the other hole that Rachel's stilettos made in the floor when were doing Jury Room(accidentally, to be sure, but definitely made for a humorous Dress Rehearsal ^_^). There, in the back, the old piano that was always out of tune, the wooden sword that just appeared one day and no one knew where it came from, the old scripts laying around, the red light, casting an eerie glow...then I was in one of my classrooms...then I wandered all around...all of it so familiar, so comforting.

 
I could go on for hours, how very vivid everything was, and yet, it is meaningful only to me, only to my lonely, half-crazed mind. I don't think anyone knows just how much I miss it there. How every day, I wake up, disgusted, and utterly miserable when I discover I'm not in my bed in Kenya, that my comfortable bed in Kenya is no longer mine. How I force myself to get up, even though I think, every second I'm awake, 'This is not my place. This place is cold, and unfamiliar'...and it hurts my heart, it aches, my chest tightens and my eyes fill with tears, when I think of how I'll never wake up in that room ever again. I'll never walk down the same path to school...

 
I went to Village Market in my dream. It was much as I remember it, though it was washed out. Pale. The colors had faded, and parts of it were not as clear as my house. I wish now I had paid more attention to those details, that I had been more observant of the things I loved.

 
I guess that I spent all 10 years I was there wishing I was somewhere else. I wanted desperately to go 'home', I wished every night that I could be where I was comfortable and safe. I imagined I'd find that in America. Here I am, and I realize that Kenya had become that safe place. It had somehow grown into 'home'. And it's too late now. Who knows if I'll be there again. I might visit one day, I might not...who knows...

 
I woke up from my dream, and lay there for another fifteen minutes, staring up at my ceiling, willing it to change, to morph into my room in Kenya. I lay there wishing that I could turn back time, and be back in a time and place where I belonged. I begged God...or perhaps no one at all...or anyone who could hear...'Let everything go back to normal. Please...make it all go away...all this college stuff, all this change...I want to go home...please, take me back' But even the most tearful cry and the most anguished sigh could not take me back.

 
And yet I cry anyways...