“And at last I see the light
And it’s like the fog has lifted
And at last I see the light
And it’s like the sky is new
And it’s warm and real and bright
And the world has somehow shifted
All at once everything looks different
Now that I see you”
– Rapunzel, Tangled
The air wore a gray mask.
Shrouded in soot with every eclipse, a gunmetal hue seeped into the deep water that the face of the sky spanned so pervasively. In a sliver of the silver moon, the clouds parted for the light’s hopeful obsolescence, only to be meshed back together again in their criminally inexorable cycle.
If it wanted to, the sea could have swallowed me up; picked me up with the treacherous waves of its strong arms, and thrown my rickety wooden canoe down to the sandy floor, lying on rock bottom with nothing to save me but the wasted hope of a million abandoned dreams.
My ambition would sink with me; the unanswered intention would fill my lungs quicker and deeper than any wave could. The steadfast grip of the water, its cold hand around my neck, would choke my yearned-for daydreams into nothing but the realization that perhaps I have been swimming towards something I may never achieve, someplace I will never reach, or someone I will never know. And, in the murky blue that I could never quite comprehend, I would drown with nothing but dreams.
But instead, there was a glimpse of orange.
Not the dark, burnt orange with shades that feel like a warning, whose polarizing features could pierce my eyes; but a lighter orange, one of the warm taste of summer and the kaleidoscope of a tangerine sky as the sun sets. An orange I had dreamed of seeing, light and gentle.
And somehow, amidst the sharp bite of the deep black sea, the orange saw me. Somewhere in my heart, the iron string of a long-pined-for dream began to beat again; steady and calm, like the placid slither of the waves under the sunrise crimson reflection of the orange. The dark hand of the water released its grip on my boat, as if it was time for a new chapter to traverse, laying in front of me with the outstretched hand of a happily foreign wake of water to wade through.
I can remember what it felt like to sink under the surface, treading to keep my head above, lungs pumping with a fruitless oxygen of hope that had become all too tempting to stop inhaling and thrashing in words I never said and things I would never be able to do.
But then one day, a seemingly boundless dream remained no longer a foreordained verdict of defeat, but reality. The fog lifted, the clouds parted, and suddenly I was not choking on broken wishes, but becoming them; the orange in someone’s sky.
And there is no greater privilege than finding someone who brings out the orange in me; the dream in me.
“You were my new dream.”
-Flynn Rider, Tangled
