The Library of Forgotten Dreams
There is a library deep inside your mind, collecting dust and dreams from your current past. There are stacks of books and rows of ladders, each waiting for their turn to be remembered.
Once a little girl came in with a smile so big in her face, searching for that one doll she loved the most. She once hoped to be a doll maker as a grown-up — just like Geppetto, the maker of Pinocchio.
She finds the doll, of course, with some ugly writings she had dreamt in her past stance, which she named: Ophelia.
But she’s not a doll maker, nor is she an Ophelia. She is a regular girl from Jakarta who travels two hours back and forth every day, drowning in a busy city and crowded public transportation. People called her the office rat — since she spends so much time in her job but with no penny to be spent.
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But dreams are gardens and they can’t stop blooming over time. She came in again to the garden of the dreams, triggered by a Mickey Mouse doll she saw at the nearest mall. She closes her eyes on her way home, and her teenage self emerges in the library once more.
She is Ellie, from the “Up” movie she watched with her crush at the farthest cinema they could reach with an old motorbike. But it’s not a motorbike, it’s a flying home that could deliver her everywhere she wants in every place in this whole wide world.
But she got no Carl. And this crush of hers left too early to build that home.
Fortunately, the library remembers. The drawings she made, just like Ellie, and the piggybank she creates, just like Carl, because she really wished to be a wild adventurer. She wants to be brave, she wants to break free, and she wants to go far, far away from her strict parents.
And she smiles, in her sleep, knowing that she made the journey she was longing to make. But this journey feels different. Now she wonders if she ever has a home.
And Ellie stops being Ellie since she realizes she is not Ellie from the start. Now she reads The Little Prince in every language and wants to be the rose in the prince’s origin. Cared, loved, nurtured, and hoped, free from all the burdens of the world. No matter how far the prince goes, he will come back straight home for his rose.
But this rose has a dream, once, to lose all her thorns. It hurts her to see everyone twitch from it when they approach. It hurts her to inadvertently use her thorns in a moment of chaos. It hurts her, the most, that she keeps forgetting that she has a flaw.
And this story of rose and her thorns are written, too, in the library of yours. Every twists and turns, tricks and thoughts, wish and wounds — let’s all just hope to visits this library once more.
