Myth of Lasting Sympathy
A Lot Like Birds Lyrics

Someone cruel gave me my dreams last night.
I dreamt something cruel last night, something that was given to me by some malevolent force.

I barely stood before a darkened closet, baring skin and soul before its unseen jaws.
In my dream, I found myself standing exposed in front of a dark closet, feeling vulnerable and completely defenseless.

"You will never be the creature that you were when you were younger," it whispered.
The mysterious voice in my dream told me that I could never be the person I once was as a child.

We get disconnected from our childhood. We tell our stories like we read them in a book but had not lived them.
As we grow older, we become disconnected from our childhood memories and often tell our stories as if we were just reading them from a book rather than actually experiencing them.

I don't remember much from then but I do remember what a closet becomes when the lights go off and I know the many things that fill it up.
Although I don't remember much about my childhood, I remember the fear I felt when the lights went out and the closet became filled with unknown terrors.

When we used to have dreams like this we called them nightmares.
As children, we would call dreams like this nightmares, and they would often leave us feeling frightened and vulnerable.

We ran barefoot through the halls of our house and clung to our parents sheets like they were the only real thing left in the world.
As children, we would run through our homes barefoot, gripping our parents' sheets as if they were the only safety we had in the world.

And my mother? She would save us, you and I. She would lead us hand in hand through the hallway that made us feel silly for seeming run by shadows and endless only moments before.
In those moments of fear, our mothers would come to our rescue, guiding us through the dark hallway and making us feel safe again.

And I'm here now, barely standing in the land of dreams before it, and I see you, I see myself as a child sitting inside. Scared. Crying.
As an adult, I find myself standing in the same terrorizing dream, seeing my scared and crying childhood self still trapped inside.

Because while we grow up through song and story learning that love is everything in this world and that while we believe it and want it more than any single thing...I know that when we have it, we destroy it.
Our childhood stories often teach us that love is the most important thing in the world, but as we grow up, we learn that sometimes, we can destroy the love we have.

That when we grow up, you and I, that we cheat.
As we grow up, we often cheat on the people we love.

That we find the girl we love and that we lose her because we learn to love ourselves much more.
We may lose the person we love because we start loving ourselves more than we love them.

That the friends that we make will drift away once we have leeched them dry.
The friendships we make can easily disappear when we have drained them of all they can give us.

That the mother who turned our darkened scary hallways into pathways to a bedroom will call us and miss us and love us and we will stay hidden.
The mother who once helped us through our fears may continue to reach out to us with love, but we may stay hidden and avoid reconnecting with her.

That really, we will be cruel!
In the end, we can all be cruel to others, even when we never intended to hurt them.

That in the stories we want told to us before we fall asleep, the heroes are ideals that never get reached and the villains are absolutely ordinary.
The stories we tell ourselves at night often feature heroes who represent ideals that are almost impossible to achieve while the villains seem like ordinary people.

And we are absolutely ordinary.
In real life, we are just as ordinary as the villains we fear.

And you stare back at me through the closet and into the world that I never really changed and ask me the only thing you want to know. "When we grow up, do we still get scared when the lights go out?"
As I stare into the closet in my dream, you (presumably my childhood self) ask me if we still get scared as adults when the lights go out.