I have wishes in my sleep
By Andrea Maxine Recto
November 15, 2024
November 15, 2024
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In my dream, I have a little girl.
We’re two dancing flames. I’m her tangerine mother; she’s my lapis lazuli daughter. We’re waltzing and laughing in a dark, empty promenade. A string quartet plays in the distance. I don’t recognize the song, but we’re moving to the words anyway. I’ve never been happier. She could never be more beautiful. We dance faster and faster, and the ground begins to crumble and open up beneath us. As we approach the final crescendo, the world explodes. Everything ends, and I wake up. And I, a girl who’s known since she was 13 that she didn’t want any children, am surprised to find grief in my chest, tears on my cheeks, and her name on my lips. |
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Andrea Maxine Recto is a Spanish-Filipino poet living in Manila whose work explores the intricacies of womanhood, grief, love, darkness, and introspection. Her poetry has been featured in One Art: a journal of poetry, Rust & Moth, the Santa Clara Review, the Red Eft Review, and elsewhere, with more forthcoming in the Long River Review, Poem Alone, and other places. When she's not writing, you can find her reading love letters in Spanish, living different lives in her dreams, or ordering a whiskey sour. You can find her on Instagram and Threads @itsandreamaxine.
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Author’s Note:
“I have wishes in my sleep” is based on a dream I had in the autumn of 2020. I’ve only ever dreamed about having children twice; this is the second time. It’s interesting to note that in both dreams, I’ve always been happy—so happy that when I wake up, tears stream down my face. This is partly because of the joy I experience in my dream—there’s so much contentment, warmth, color, beauty, and detail. The other part is mourning what I don’t have. I can feel in my body, even before I wake up and my mind makes the connection, that this isn’t real—that it’s only just a dream.
This mix of sadness and joy is quite confusing because I’ve been sure since I was young that I wasn’t going to be a mother, for several reasons, but I won’t get into them now. Although this is my reality, I remember these dreams with such fondness. This dream about dancing with my daughter in the dark was so beautiful and pure, and although it could be interpreted that the dream ended horribly, I feel differently. It was fleeting, untainted, and ethereal. If I could name my daughter, I’d call her Chartreuse, Charlie for short.
Sometimes, I like to use my dreams to help me process situations in real life that I can’t fully understand when I’m awake. I sometimes wonder if I’m meant to learn something from these dreams or perhaps, just appreciate them for what they are in the moment.