Between then and now

I was listening to “I Have a Dream” by ABBA the other day, and man, it hit me like a ton of bricks and took me straight back to being a kid.

That was my school’s graduation song. It always reminds me of those weird, hazy days between February and March. I remember watching the kids just one year older than me, who seemed like actual adults at the time, practicing in the heat all month long for their big day.

“I have a dream, a song to sing. To help me cope with anything…”

I can still hear those kids. Their voices were always a little too high-pitched, but they sang with this devastatingly sincere intensity. They would mouth the lyrics with a sense of fulfillment that you can only really possess before you’ve had your first real heartbreak or your first soul-crushing job. Looking back, it’s wild how we were all just children with these massive, “oversized” dreams.

Back then, the world felt tiny but also impossible. Success wasn’t about tax brackets, LinkedIn “announcements,” or trying to figure out what the hell “work-life balance” actually looks like. It was simple: a gold star, the look on your parents’ faces, and the absolute certainty that by the time we reached the age we are now, we’d have it all figured out. We thought “growing up” was a destination—like a city you eventually reach—rather than this messy, exhausting trek through the woods that it actually is.

Watching those older kids practice, I didn’t see the stress of final exams or the anxiety of moving to a new, scarier school. I saw giants. To a child, a one-year age gap is an epoch. They were the “big kids,” the ones standing on the precipice of the future. As they sang about crossing the stream and seeing the wonder of a fairy tale, I felt a desperate, impatient hunger to be in their shoes.

I didn’t realize then that the fulfillment I saw on their faces was actually their first taste of a bittersweet goodbye. They weren’t just singing about dreams; they were singing to bridge the gap between the safety of childhood and the cold uncertainty of what came next.

As we grow, our dreams undergo a brutal process of distillation. At 7, your ambitions are boundless; you want to be an astronaut-teacher-princess. At 17, your world narrows; you just want to get into a good college or hope your crush notices you in the hallway. At 27, or 37, the dream shifts again. Now, you might just want a job that doesn’t make you want to scream into a pillow on Monday mornings. It’s not just the mornings, either; sometimes it’s a random Tuesday at 2 p.m. when the weight of “being an adult” feels like a backpack full of rocks.

But beneath that layer of cynicism, that kid from the graduation rehearsal is still there. We’ve all crossed the stream dozens of times by now. We’ve navigated the currents of heartbreak, the sharp rocks of career pivots, and the quiet, sobering realization that the future we were promised isn’t a fixed point on a map, but a moving target that keeps shifting every time we get close.

We often spend so much time mourning the loss of our childhood dreams that we forget to celebrate the fact that we actually survived the reality that replaced them. There is a specific kind of melancholy in realizing you are now the age of the people you once thought were “real adults.” You look in the mirror and realize there is no magical moment when you suddenly feel like you have all the answers. You’re just a kid with more bills to pay, a better vocabulary, and higher caffeine dependency.

However, there is also a profound beauty in that. Those kids in the courtyard weren’t singing because they knew they would win; they were singing because they believed they could. To hold on to that sense of wonder in a world that tries its absolute hardest to iron it out of you is its own quiet act of rebellion. It’s a choice to remain “unironed.”

ABBA knew something we didn’t quite grasp as children: having a dream isn’t about the destination. It’s about dreaming itself. It’s the “fantasy” that helps us move through the heavy sludge of reality.

If I could go back to those February afternoons, I wouldn’t tell those kids to study harder or warn them about the fluctuating economy. I’d just sit on those warm concrete steps, listen to those high-pitched voices one more time, and remind myself to breathe. I’d tell myself that it’s okay not to have it all figured out, because no one else does either.

We are still those kids. We are still practicing for a day that hasn’t come yet. We are still mouthing the lyrics to a future we haven’t quite mastered, hoping we don’t trip during the processional. And as long as the music is playing, as long as we can still see the wonder hidden in the mundane tasks of a Tuesday afternoon, we haven’t lost our way. We are just on a longer bridge than we expected, still crossing the stream, still carrying the dream.

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Shanell Jay Aguinaldo, 24, exists in the Metro and pretends to know what he’s doing most of the time.