The Dreams We Traded for Bread

He used to say, “I will hold the heart of a man in my hands and make it beat again.” I thought he was being poetic, just a boy in a starched uniform who liked the smell of methylated spirit. I laughed a little and told him to finish his Eba first. I didn’t know the stethoscope would end up hanging on a nail behind a bedroom door. Not like that.... The dreams left that night..... They left somewhere between the third ASUU strike and the day the bank balance started looking like a phone number. They left the night the induction fee became the money for a mother’s surgery. We begged the system not to break us. We told them our brains were gold mines. We said we would sit through the blackouts and the heat, no matter how long the wait lasted... but the hunger was deeper than a degree could reach. And maybe we realized that letting go was the only way to stay alive. We didn’t belong in a small shop, selling data bundles and charging phones. We belonged in the theater, in the workshops, and in the labs with our steady hands and our big ideas. Now, the "Side Hustle" looks good some days. The "Tech" money is coming in. The business is steady, but it feels wrong. Because every credit alert, every delivery note, every sale that isn't "The Dream"... reminds us of what we lost. What the country lost. We didn’t want to be "Vendors." We wanted to be what we wrote on those Career Day posters. We wanted the dream to stay, but it changed. Just like that. In books, they call this Occupational Displacement. It is a fancy way of saying the world wasn't ready for your brilliance. But in the streets, we know the real name: The Great Pivot. Yet, look at the magic we made from the pieces. The Engineer who never built a bridge now manages a fleet of trucks with the same careful mind, moving food across the land. The Doctor who never got her ward now runs a business that feeds twenty families, treating an economy that was bleeding. We are a nation of "Almosts" who became "Everything." We might not be wearing the white coats or the hard hats we saw in our sleep. Our hands are stained with different inks and different oils, but we are still here. The sky isn't pretty because we reached the stars we wanted. The sky is pretty because of the light we kept burning down here, in the dark, when the doors were locked. We didn't get the world we asked for, so we built a new one with our own hands. We didn't just survive. We became the miracle we were waiting for.

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