Great things from the valley, small things from the peak.: In between dreams.

She is a high energy thing, although quite small and shapeless. Her body is undefined by conventional anatomy, and her hair defies movement despite constant pacing. More importantly, she lives in a stark black world. The black horizon and zenith equally as black as the horizontal and vertical. This phenomenon makes it appear she perpetually paces over a point fixed in midair. She paces impatiently, faster and faster until she collides into the next dream.

With the approach of a dim and blurry nightdream, her body takes shape and dons vague clothes or still no clothes at all depending on that nightdream’s atmosphere. These nightdreams lapse her physical and mental control, yet maintain her cognitive sense of wakefulness. Most of these nightdreams evoke anxiety, like the sinking feeling she missed differential equations for the third time. Sometimes she snaps quickly out of a nightdream, back to her lumpy floating world, awoken by her laughter or screams. Other times she gradually awakes from the exhausting success of using windmill arms to fly or whirling legs to run on the dream's frictionless surface.

With fists clenched and body slanted forward like a balanced egg she charges through achromatic eternity. More often than a nightdream she finds daydreams. Her body always embodies the same girl, but with different clothing styles enfolding a body of varying ages. Sizes. The girl in the dark world embodies her during states of desperation and exaltation, wrought with aspirations and adorations. Daydreams in desperation are equally as searing and dark as her stark world. Other daydreams she embodies the girl cresting a pass in some mountains high above a desert. Anticipation of this array of daydreams motivates her through the inky world, even at the risk of running into nightmarish nightdreams.

After dropping out of a daydream, her simple world increases in monotony. Frustrated again she enables movement in only enough fibers to power forward motion and tenses every muscle. Rarely she encounters inbetreams in the darkness, and those are the best. During these dreams she achieves a state of immobile waking, watching clouds run across the sky like a blanket sliding or walls flickering like streetlights through boxcar slats. Inbetreams portray themselves as daydreams until the girl questions herself. Like when the sunset reflected off every window, no matter its orientation, with dancing colors like light waves of the same ubiquitous television show. In inbetreams she might pass people relaxing into trees or run for hours from thick grey clouds botching the trail like an eraser. Unlike tense movement in the stark black world, in dreams she can move with weary ease through any intricate landscape.

There is post race depression, when hours of training per day for months cease, and the world becomes lame and aimless. Getting accepted to graduate school is a similar feeling, except the euphoria more explosive and downfall more bottomless. In my case, I raced a 55k and got accepted to CSU two days later, so I really hit rock bottom. In another month or so I'm sure I will have goals to shoot for, but for the time being I am left feeling haphazard.

For the last five years (...one year, ten years, when this dream started) my goal was to earn a Master's, and all of the sudden I'm in. I moved to Colorado anticipating I would get into graduate school. In the Front Range, of all places. I found a job at a coffee shop, determined it would be in the name of nostalgia and not failing my career goals. I banked on my skills and got where I needed to be, but now what?