When She Watched Over Us

She watches over us, guarding our dreams, cradling our wishes, even the ones we don’t know of yet. She stands, unwavering in her commitment, as rain soaks into her toes and birds rest in her ears. She’s always been there. Go to the local history museum, visit the archives, and you’ll find an old drawing, charcoal marks scrawled on a scrap of crumbling paper: Our town, 1504. An artist’s rendering of a collection of stone houses, nothing more than a simple trading town, and behind them, a bit in the distance, there she stands.

You and your friends debate what materials she’s made of—stone, metal, ivory, marble–possibilities that have little overlap, but provoke too much excitement to be ruled out.

She was a goddess—one your grandparents can probably remember, if only you’d think to ask—you could probably find her in one of those old books squeezed into the bottom shelf of one of their bookshelves, between cookbooks from a few decades ago and baby photo albums of your parents. Take it out, read it, before it’s too late. In a few years it’ll be out of circulation. In a few more the book will end up in the donation box and some twenty-something who is still figuring out life will find it at a consignment shop, flip through its musty pages, then pay three dollars to take it home, cut out its drawings of our ancient goddesses and gods, and paste them into a collage.

Superstitious elders nag their children to pray to her, and it isn’t uncommon, before big exam days, performances, or proposals to see someone kneeling before her, eyes closed, face contorted, asking for aid, luck, anything, to make this one dream come true.

But that isn’t necessary.

She likes us. Those funny little souls we call “humans.” She’s taken it upon herself to collect them all, these dreams, plans, desires, from the moment one sparks in the mind. She considers herself a steward, and provides safe harbor for these dreams, somewhere to store them as we set out to finish our most pressing goals. There are many things for us to accomplish, but she tries to be patient, watching as we wander further from these dreams.

She’s liable to collapse any day now, heavy, and weary from her burden. This weight grew slowly over the years. She didn’t realize it until she was so weighed down, she could barely move. Her joints ache, her smile stings, her eyes yearn to close. In her weakest moments she thinks that it would be best to simply collapse, to allow herself to fall on us all, let loose all the dreams, desires we’ve stored up in her all these years. Take them! They’re yours… There’s never the right moment, it’ll never come, it is tomorrow–no–the next day.

But she knows that would destroy us. A wash of hopes and dreams falling upon us, an invisible tsunami a thousand feet wide, a force that would drown us before we even felt its chill.

Do you see that crease between her eyes?

She doesn’t want to let it show, but it’s getting to her, we’re getting to her. It’s us. Her favorites. Dreams don’t ferment into wine or preserve like pressed flowers, they mold, they crumble, they fade until they’re paper-thin and unreadable. They diminish until they’re nothing more than the little pains you feel when you move a certain way and the aches of guilt that hit you in the evenings when you’re trying to fall asleep.

Her mind is clouded by all of us. She can’t remember why she remains, only that A––– wants –––, and M––– wishes ––– and she can’t move because these all weigh her down. Her eyes are narrowing, impatience is creeping into her gaze, can’t you see?

The municipal safety crew comes in one day and erects ladders up her sides and scaffolding up her arms. Like worker ants, they unscrew her right hand from her wrist. They lower it to the ground slowly, until it presses into the dirt below. The wrinkle above her eyes fades as she feels some dreams wisp out of her. On another day, there goes her left hand, then her ears, then her head (they roll it down the street to the truck, which waits patiently with its back open and belts ready to tie the head down).

They had noticed that her joints were rusting and loosening (she was made of metal, not marble, it was discovered) and her body had started to sway gently in the wind. Her foundation, upon which her bare feet stood for so many centuries, was cracking quietly. They feared for the town, which lay for so long in her loving shadow. She could collapse in an instant, crushing the people below without warning.

It was all organized with the care and effort she loved them for.

And as each limb was removed, the once-possible-tsunami, now a gentle trickle, began to wash over the town. Dreams recalled, the widower ousted the well-established weeds from his garden, the baker bought a guitar, the shy schoolgirl passed a note to her desk mate, and the woman wrote her first words down as a poet. Gardens bloomed, streets filled with music, new books flooded the shelves of bookstores and happy couples walked the streets linked at the arms.

And she, well, she rested. Eyes closed, but she could hear it all, as she basked further from the sun, but content. Empty but warm. She could rest.

Her shadow no longer hung over the town. They had moved her parts to a junkyard, but then, consumed by nostalgia, they packed up her metal pieces and brought them to a park. She became a new sort of play structure.

There, as children raced through the hollows of her arms and peered out through her eyes, they may whisper their dreams—for the rumors of what she once did reached their world too. But they didn’t need her anymore. The dreams they whispered as they curled up in her ears or hid in her feet followed them out, flowing like invisible smoke through the cavities of her body. They shrouded the children like a gentle fog, one that did not lift even after the children finally left the play structure, resolved (since they had reached the mature age of 10) to be more grown-up. The dreams stayed with the children like a secret hidden from themselves, secretly propelling their actions. They were not meant to be trapped away but carried. There was no better steward for their dreams than themselves.