Waiting for news from Graduate school

Dreams have a strange way of dying. They don’t just slip away gently, pass away leaving no sign of departure. They tend to explode, or, more accurately, implode, fall in on themselves as their contradictions and impossibilities are exposed and the withering termites of reality eat way at their girders. Death comes to them quickly and, often, unexpectedly, yet the process itself takes time, time as each carefully laid plank of a plan snaps and falls in turn, time as the rubble settles and the dust clears. What is revealed after this time is a loss but not a hole; if dreams were to explode, to violently disappear in a blast of sound and fury and leave nothing in their stead, it would perhaps be easier to replace them, to fill their gap. Instead, dreams leave a heaping pile of debris which must be painstakingly cleared, a tangled coil of connections and dead cords which must be snapped from the remaining elements of a life, before any new structure can be erected in their place.

That is not the worst, however. Worse than a dream that dies is a dream which is threatened. A dream whose weakness and shoddy foundation become exposed just as strong winds spring up. You begin to hate the dream for its weakness, to want to tear it down before the winds have a chance, and to build something better, stronger in its place before the storm even ends, but at the same time you can’t do it, you can’t abandon the dream while it still looks as if it might make it through, even though you now see its weaknesses its sheer presence and resilient possibility scream out against its abandonment.