🎈When Balloons Become Coins: A Dream from the Wheelchair🎈

The other night I had a dream. And like most dreams, it didn’t ask for permission—it just arrived, vivid and weird and strangely sacred…. I think.

I was walking through a quiet neighborhood. Fall had clearly checked in: the trees were bare, the air felt crisp, and I was with my best friend’s parents and a small child—maybe two or three years old. We found two balloons along the way. Simple white ones. Joyful, floating, light. The kind that make toddlers smile and grown-ups nostalgic.

The baby cried. I don’t know if it was her balloon or just the idea of something pure drifting off forever. But we comforted her and went to get another one. Because that’s what you do when something good escapes your hands—you try to bring back a version of it.

We kept walking. Me, the baby, the balloons, and the falling season.

Somehow, as dreams go, I began collecting more white balloons—walking through a neighborhood that looked both familiar and not. But the trees, tall and bare, made me nervous. I worried the branches might pop what I was holding. So I did what any balloon-carrying, overprotective spirit-warrior would do: I brought them in closer. I held them tightly, protecting these fragile floating things like they were sacred.

Eventually, I arrived at an apartment—maybe mine, maybe someone else’s—but I knew I was safe there. And here’s where it gets trippy.

I released the balloons into the room, expecting them to rise. But they didn’t. They deflated mid-air, falling gently to the ground… and when they hit the floor, they transformed into coins.

Yeah. Coins.

Not quarters or nickels or anything I could identify. Just strange, sacred coins. I dropped to my knees and stared at them like a man trying to decipher a challenging Sudoku puzzle. I turned to the baby and whispered something that surprised even me:

“Don’t worry… they’ll turn back into white balloons.”

I woke up still holding that sentence in my chest.

I don’t always recognize the coins this illness gives me. They’re not always shiny. Sometimes they look like days I can’t walk. Or mornings I wake up angry that my body forgot how to be my body. But every now and then, in the silence of reflection, I realize they’ve been currency for something deeper: patience, presence, surrender.

And maybe… just maybe… some of them are waiting to become white balloons again.

If you’re reading this and holding something fragile—hope, grief, identity, health—I see you. Keep walking. Hold on tight. Let go when it’s time. And trust that even the deflated things still carry magic.

Because even coins can fly, if you believe hard enough