when i was fifteen i had this daydream. In it I wore a dark sweater with high neck and tight fit, and so did the dark haired girl holding my arm. In the daydream we would be walking briskly along a new york city avenue at twilight, laughing maybe at some funny remark one of us had made, our faces forward and chins up, white smiles, my strawberry blond hair fluttering in a cold wind. No one was able to get near us we were so perfectly alone. When I was twenty I had a similar daydream, but by then the girl had a name–Wendy–and she had blond hair and we were in her father’s antique wooden speedboat arriving at the Boothbay Yacht Club in boothbay harbor Maine. In that daydream I was telling her about my silly teenage daydreams of the dark-haired girl and we were laughing at both our immaturity as we arrived to the waiting hands of a dock worker in white gloves taking the bow line of the boat and welcoming us to the dinner party, party decks decorated in the young evening with white christmas lights, and guests already settled and socializing lifting wine glasses to our arrival in acceptance and familiarity. In my late twenties I entertained a daydream of Africa and the desert and me arriving back in new york city to my, again, dark-haired lover. In this daydream she greets me at the curb at JFK and kisses me, one foot raised in joy behind her like we are in a movie. But in this daydream all is not well, she is frustrated at my long journeys. I have a scruffy chin and I tell her this is the price to pay for being with an adventurer. Take it or leave it attitude. Then it is as if the daydreams just blur in the years following and swirl with actual memories of so many hands I did in fact hold and faces I did in fact arrive to at airport curbs and kiss, and one dark-haired girl who did in fact take me up on the attitude and left it… me… a girl I had in fact met while we both were wearing high-necked, dark sweaters…
I don’t know if it is arrogant or shameful or just a fact to admit I have had more amazing experiences in such a short lifetime as almost anyone I have met. It is as if I took my silly romantic daydreams and actually made them come true. The only problem has been I have not had any follow-up. My daydreams have been like great beginnings to movies, but when the tension comes and the audience expects something to happen, some transformation in the character maybe, something leading them to want to cheer and see the possibility of healing for their own broken lives, it is as if I walk off the set. If mine were the story The Notebook I would not finish the house. It is like as soon as the difficulties enter my story I have just fled and run away.
For me the running away has literally taken me to other countries and remote places. And each time I have gone there has been something of a search for that thing that is present in all those daydreams, some love and security, some perfect warm feeling like a Jimmy Stewart movie. I have literally traversed continents in search of that missing something, like a dying man in search of a serum.
Two nights ago I sat with Sofia in a car and talked about her life. I had on a dark sweater, she was in several layers of colorful t-shirts. She talked to me about her teen life and her dreams and her struggles and I just sat and looked at her beautiful face and black hair in the light of a street lamp coming through a window. I thought, how incredible it is to have a chance to give the story a proper ending, and one the audience was not expecting… an ending not for romance but for family… an ending that is as much a beginning…
A new daydream emerges… father and daughter… daughter with her own daydreams and secret hopes and fairy-wishes, a father conscious of his errors and comfortable in being silent and just letting the beautiful girl talk… just let her talk… just let her dream… don’t take away the dreams… don’t tell her prince charming won’t come, because maybe he will… Don’t try and explain the pain and tell her I have found the serum because I have not… the only serum to our loneliness and pain is to listen to each other and let each other dream and to be wiling to stick around and suffer the building of the house… the joy of turning on our own white christmas lights in summer and driving our own boat up to our own dock for our own family…
Like my twilight life of fairy tales and other hopes, this photo of my friend sarah reminds me of things hidden as if on the other side of a tunnel to a different world… like the worlds of fairy tales and reality are not so far apart as they would seem… and yet so very very very far at times… a tunnel away or separated by icky darkness… And who knows from which world sarah is peering… whether from the green fairy tale world of plush lawn flowing into cool stream… or is she in the hard real world looking for the other…
Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 27th November, 2009.