A dream deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Don't get me wrong. Despite the expostulations of my well-meaning roommate, there was no bad choice, no rock, no hard place, no Scylla, no Charybdis. Only two amazingly good strokes of luck, sandwiching a providential determination of good health.

Still, it was bittersweetly that I released one dream in order to embrace another. The cheap plastic lei I'd draped on my CYPRESS stateroom door when I'd first received those improbable "OPS on RUSH" orders last year still beckoned, hopeful, dusty but unforgotten, on a closet door in my San Francisco apartment. The dream still flickered in the dusty depths of my mind, only set aside by chemo and radiation and temporary distractions, never abandoned, never boxed up, never tossed out.

Lightning never strikes twice. One or the other. Half-hearted ideas I tossed up to the detailer sank like rocks. The ship wasn't willing to waive the schools I'd miss, didn't want to wait, needed me now or never. So, no. My roommate reassured me, "Hawaii isn't going anywhere," and my great white visions slowly faded to black, to thoughts of perhaps a buoy tender out there, something else, the dream still not released, just set aside, just deferred, in stasis, waiting.

As thrilled as I was about the deployment, I still had to keep explaining to everyone why I'd chosen the improbable over the unlikely. An exhausting day aboard BOUTWELL, driving the ship from drydock back to homeport, unpredictably stirred up the spirits again - ear to the wind, the news was that BOUTWELL's CO had been advocating for me with JARVIS's CO. Why two captains, one who never met me and the other who'd seen me in action for all of two weeks and a day, would negotiate over me like choice chattel, was beyond me.

So I started to pack my seabag, and to plan for my return this summer, and to wrap up things in the office; but I couldn't help but cast a few last longing glances at that cheap plastic lei, considering packing it away. On second thought, I left it hanging where it was, garish plastic flowers against a drab white closet, reminding me, a dream deferred.