I woke up this morning to find 花花’s wonderful piece about dreaming of claiming a whole city to herself. 美語世界： my embarrassing childhood fantasy - 由樹的花花世界發表 - 文學城 (wenxuecity.com) I thought to myself: "Gee! Didn't this happen to me once, on a much smaller scale anyway?”
This is a true story; I'm sharing it just for fun.
I'm pretty sure everyone, at one time or another, in various versions, has had the same kind of fantasy as 花花, just because of a shared yearning inside all of us for freedom.
Truth be told, had the fantasy become reality, people would likely be disappointed. I know because a fantasy of this nature did become reality for me once.
It happened during winter when I was in second grade. My school at the time was right beside, and to the west of, Sun Yat-sen Park. My parents had taken us kids to visit the park many times, one reason being, I'm guessing here, that entrance was for free.
Being a boring place on the whole, its main draw, so far as I was concerned, was the playground for kids. It boasted the usual stuff, such as a couple of swings, a slide, some seesaws and a spin-chair (with multiple chairs connected to a common, vertical, axle and the chairs spun around when pushed). Much as I loathed the other, grownup-oriented, things in the park, I really enjoyed spending time there, and time there seemed always so fleeting.
The problem was that we always went visiting on Sunday, the only weekend day at the time, and the playground was invariably crowded on that day. This gave rise to a fantasy of mine: how I wish I could have the whole playground to myself! Alas, the fantasy became reality when, one day, I stole out of school during class break and went into the park. I headed straight for the playground. To my utter jubilance, I found it totally empty, all to myself. Wasting no time, I immediately went about trying out each item.
It soon dawned on me, though, that I was going through this horrible process of seeing a beautiful dream turning into a nightmare. With no one hurrying me down the slide, no one to sit on the other side of a seesaw, no one to compete with me to see who could swing higher and no one to help spin the spin-chair, the place became an utter bore. It was so boring time seemed to crawl to a stop, and I was so bored by it all that I was willing to sneak back into school during another class break to go back to class!
I know there is some sort of moral lesson to draw from this fantasy-to-nightmare experience, but I don't know how to put it into words. Can someone help me?
