How memories become like dreams and dreams like memories.

We are on the main campus at Bard, just a few yards away from Stone Row where I stayed during undergrad. I don’t remember where we were coming from or where we went afterwards. I was watching you with a little Asian girl. I don’t know who she was or where she came from but it was the weekend so she may have been a relative of one of the students whose family was visiting, maybe a student you knew. She smiled at you and was familiar with you. You held her by both hands and spun her into a circle until her feet hovered off the ground. Happiness, joy, laughter and spinning consumed the both of you. I glimpsed the father in you with a part of me I hadn’t known existed until that moment. I watched you as I had watched you several times before with women, with little girls. I watched in awe and in envy. She had your total attention. You were her servant, kneeling down in front of her and meeting her at her level. And it was then that I thought vaguely of parenthood and of the power to make someone you love that happy. It seemed so simple, so sweet, easy even. But of course it wasn’t. Of course you were not. It was one thing to witness, to play at and to pretend. But the dreamer is not living, The dreamer is asleep. The witness is only watching, not participating. Living requires a leap.

11.16.14

-ZG Daniel