Dream Link

by Francesco Armada

Credit: ChatGPT

Walking to the bus stop, I see someone who catches my eye. He’s a man in casual clothes with brown hair and standing at an average height, around five feet six (approximately). It isn't his comically large suitcase that seems too heavy for someone of his stature to carry, but his eyes that catch my attention. His right eye is a dim shade of blue, almost as if worn from the elements of life and its complexity. His left eye is a bright white that shimmers in the light of the brightly shining summer sun. Just as quickly as he grabbed my attention away from whatever I was looking at before, he got in a car and drove off.

“Could you help out your fellow man?” I hear behind me a man who can't be described as old just yet, but the man has definitely experienced the longer side of life. His clothes indicated the same, too. It's the type of clothes that the average person would look at and involuntarily make a “grossed out” type of face. I do feel bad for him and give him a ten-dollar bill. As I walk towards my bus, I hear the same voice from behind me, “God bless you, woman, you don’t know how much even a little bit can go.” From the bright blue seat on the bus, I wave from the window to the now much happier, not old man. 

I don’t like to think that I am someone who stands out very much. I live a humble life being a landscape artist and sell my paintings on social media. With that experience, I know what it's like to be your own boss, which is something a lot of people don’t experience. The typical person will work a job where they work under a “boss” figure and do every little thing they say. If they say, “Go fetch me a cup of coffee!” Your reply should be “Yes, Sir!” If you want to keep that paycheck coming in, then it’s necessary to be that person. That person may excel at a certain job and eventually get a promotion. There is no actual percentage, but only 7.63% of people don't get promoted after working at the same job for five consecutive years. Thankfully, my daily schedule does not include being a lapdog for a man (or woman) in a big chair. My entire “job”, if you could call it that, is to take the bus to a secluded area and hike into the mountains and paint a wonderful sunset. The only difficulty of my job is being able to paint the sunset while it's still paintable. Every sunset is different in its own way. The trees could have grown a little bit, or the sun is at a different angle. The smallest technical difference can make the biggest impact on the sunset. The same can go for people as well. The smallest change over even just a day can drastically change how others perceive them. 

I keep seeing the man with the different colored eyes. He shows up in my dreams and wherever I go. Although seeing the man everywhere for the past few years isn’t the strangest part, the strangest part is that I feel a sense of comfort that I feel exclusively with my family and good friends. I always struggled with the idea of love as a kid. The idea of cherishing just one specific person over everyone else is something that I never understood. I was always told things along the lines of “You just haven’t found anyone worth loving yet”, or “You’ll find the one someday.” Even now, the only people that I can say I truly “love” are my family. Not even my friends can come close to what the feeling of love is supposed to be like. I don’t think I would even know if I felt the emotion called love. Tragic, I know, maybe a little bit corny, but that's how my thought process goes.

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Being an entrepreneur is something I have wanted to do my whole life. I can’t think of a time when being my own boss wasn’t enticing. Of course, some things are worse about being your own boss. You have to limit yourself and assign yourself all the things that a traditional boss would tell you to do. Long story short, you have to think a lot more and have the motivation to do the things that need to be done. That happens, though, when you reach adulthood. Things that weren’t an issue when you were a kid become your biggest obstacles. I think the desire to be my own boss stems from my childhood. I didn’t have some kind of traumatic childhood or anything.

I was raised by a single mother who always tried her best in the hardest of times. I never did have the newest thing. I was always using things that were old or discontinued. I remember in my high school years, I used a phone from about 10 years back. It wasn’t the best phone, and it couldn't handle the things I wanted it to back then, but it got the job done.

Going to school was never really a hassle for me. I didn’t like school, don't get me wrong, but I knew it was necessary in order to succeed in life. I don’t have any memory of elementary school because that happens as you get older. I went to a small middle school that was better known for being an elementary school. If I told you the name, you would have never heard of it. It was the type of school that everyone had been there since birth. I’ll leave it to you to figure out how kids who had known each other their entire lives treated someone much, much smaller than them. High school was a blur since I didn’t do much but trudge through every day. Now that leads me to my life in the present.

Today I’m going to a nearby bus stop because I see people who look profitable and can be of service to my “business”. Fun fact about the word “business”: the word, if pronounced as spelled, is very similar to a word that doesn’t actually exist: busyness. If it were a word, it might mean the act of being busy. That word accurately describes my job. 

  I’m carrying a suitcase that I’m sure looks as if it's too proportionally big compared to my body. Walking around, I see a motley of people who don’t seem as profitable as expected. I see multiple homeless people wearing raggedy clothes and shaking metal cans with little to no money inside. I see a rounded man with a sort of lumberjack kind of fashion with a button-down checkered shirt, and leather brown pants. One person catches my attention.

She is, at first glance, very beautiful and at second glance, still very beautiful. She has a sort of dirty blonde hair that has faint paint stains. A blue blouse that looks to be pretty worn, but also somehow elegant in its own sense. It’s not her deep brown eyes or her somewhat tanned complexion that grabs my attention. It’s something more uncanny, like a string that connects me to her. She seems so far from my view, and yet she is only about 30 feet away from me. I force my view away and get into a nearby taxi and drive back home to work more online. I seem to have better luck in sales when I advertise online.

The image of that woman lingers in my mind. Not wanting to go into more inappropriate thoughts. I attempt to think of something else. I drift off as I so often do into thought. Now and then, I try to remember my life up to now. It’s a habit I picked up in childhood. Something inside me wanted to remember something. A faint memory that seems to be mine, but also so far away. I look back on my life and try to recall my memories. Every year that passes, I lose more and more. Memories, I am told, make up a person more than anatomical structure. If that's the case, then it feels as though my head is falling from my body.