Enchanted Reverie 🌒
📖 Behind the Story
I wrote this after thinking about all the advice we carry when we leave home—all those voices telling us who we should be, what we should want, how we should spend our youth.
But sometimes, in a crowded room halfway across the world, you realize the only voice that matters is the one saying yes to what your heart actually needs.
The story came from Jordy Searcy’s “Love & War in Your Twenties”—a song that captures that beautiful, terrifying feeling when you’re supposed to have all this freedom, but you’re also carrying everyone else’s expectations like stones in your pockets.
I kept thinking about leaving home. All the advice I’ve gotten over the years from friends, family, and influential figures in my life.
Looking back, it felt like living in this enchanted dream state where you’re trying on different versions of yourself, following advice that sounds magical but doesn’t quite fit.
Then you have these moments—like meeting someone across a bar—that wake you up to what you actually want.
That’s when you stop performing someone else’s vision of your life and start writing your own.
Well. At least that’s the hope.
Creative Choices:
The repetition of the father’s advice creates an echo effect—it follows Ezra everywhere until that moment in the bar when it finally goes quiet. That’s when his own voice takes over.
I wanted the setting to feel both specific (Bangkok pub, dimly lit, crowded) and universal. That moment of eye contact across a room that changes everything? That’s timeless. That’s everywhere.
The closing deliberately doesn’t resolve, which is counter to most flash fiction I write. We don’t know if Ezra and Marcus will fall in love. We don’t even know if they’ll exchange numbers.
What matters is that Ezra chose possibility over prescription.
He chose his own yes.
💭 A Question for You
What advice have you carried that you finally had to set down?
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