What Happened To the Dreamers?

What happens to our dreams? They seem to discolor; they shrivel and fall wistfully into distant memory like so many autumn leaves. They seem to slip from grasp and shatter painfully as they hit the floor like so many glasses before it. When we grow, our hearts become lost in the inferno. They fry, dry out, turn crispy. They become easily cracked, fragile. They become useless, sterilized. I watch my first hour teacher as she preaches generalizations of relationships we don't want. She gives examples from her own life. I watch and I see nothing. She is dead from the inside out. Her humanity is locked in dormancy. She is a hollow shell with a voice box. Sometimes I think she should take a queue from Hemingway; paint the walls with the back of her skull and fragments of led-fused brain tissue. When the dreams go, so goes the heart, so goes the soul, so goes self-will, so goes humanity. Pry into the mind of a child. Look around, soak it in. See what we've all been missing.