If I Could Paint the Dream

“If I Could Paint the Dream”

Genre: Poetic Short Story / Artistic Prose

BY [ WAQAR ALI ]

If I could paint the dream,

I wouldn’t start with color.

Not yet.

I’d begin with silence.

A blank canvas humming with the echo of things unsaid,

Unlived.

Unlearned.

That is where the dream begins—

in the breath between forgetting and remembering,

when the world is both too much and not enough.

It’s a whisper trapped beneath a cathedral of ribs,

where the heart builds a shrine for someone

who may never return.

In my dream,

I am twelve again.

My hands are covered in indigo—

not paint, not ink,

but something more ancient.

It stains me like memory:

deep, defiant, and holy.

I’m standing in a field that shouldn’t exist.

Wildflowers bend to the rhythm of a wind I can’t feel,

and above me, the sky churns in oil-spill colors.

A storm frozen mid-thought.

Time holds its breath.

And there she is.

My mother.

Not as she was before the sickness hollowed her,

but how I remember her best:

laughing in the garden,

singing to the tomatoes,

barefoot and bold as July.

She doesn’t speak in the dream.

She only looks at me—

eyes like wet violet silk,

like she sees through me

into the corners of who I might’ve become

if grief hadn’t sculpted me too soon.

I try to run to her.

The field shifts.

Now it’s a hallway.

Old. Empty. Infinite.

My school?

No.

The hospital?

Almost.

It’s the space where prayers go unheard.

I walk.

Each step leaves behind a trail of words

I didn’t know I was carrying:

"Don’t go."

"Stay."

"I wasn’t ready."

"I’m still not."

The light flickers overhead—

not fluorescent, not natural—

but something in-between.

A light that only exists in dreams or dying.

From behind a door, I hear music.

A violin.

The same song she used to play when the world was too loud.

The notes float out like petals on black water,

graceful and aching.

I open the door.

The room is filled with mirrors.

Hundreds.

Each one reflecting a version of me:

child, adult, lover, coward, poet, thief, healer, ghost.

Each reflection mouths the same question:

“What are you still holding on to?”

I want to answer.

But my voice is filled with feathers.

Soft. Weightless. Useless.

Then one mirror begins to bleed.

Not red.

But violet.

Viola’s color.

The hue of twilight promises

and wounds that choose beauty

as their armor.

From the mirror steps a version of me

I do not recognize.

Older.

Not in age, but in sorrow.

Her smile is tired,

but her hands are steady.

She hands me a brush.

“Paint,” she says.

“Or you’ll forget her.”

I dip the brush into the bleeding glass.

The color hisses,

like it knows this is goodbye.

I paint.

Not with skill,

but with ache.

I paint the field,

the indigo-stained hands,

the woman who no longer sings to tomatoes.

I paint the dream before it forgets me.

I paint until the canvas begins to breathe.

It sighs.

Flickers.

Fades.

When I wake,

my pillow is wet.

The morning is cruel in its brightness.

But on my desk—

where I swore there was only clutter—

sits a single violet petal.

And beneath it, a note

in my mother’s handwriting:

"Don’t paint the pain.

Paint the remembering."

So I do.

Every day.

In words, in rhythm, in grief.

I paint.

And when the light comes

like teeth against the edge of dawn,

when my heart forgets what it’s beating for,

when dreams slip from memory like water through lace—

I remember the field.

The music.

The mirror.

The version of me that bled violet and survived it.

And I begin again.

Brush in hand.

Silence first.