When I was young, my body sat in a chair but my life did not.
My life was busy somewhere else. Running, saving, building, loving.

In my head I carried volumes. I had names for the backstories and moral dilemmas that kept me awake in the soft way joy keeps you awake. I lived so many happy lives that my single body could barely contain them. I was brave in those hours. I was generous. I was chosen. I was beautiful, not because anyone said so, but because beauty was a condition of existing in a world I made with care.

The classroom was a narrow place for someone like that. Fluorescent lights gave instructions I already knew how to ignore. My eyes were open, but the real work happened behind them. Teachers called it drifting, or daydreaming. They said my name sharply, like pulling a cord, and I would snap back into a room that felt less alive than what I had just left. They mistook stillness for absence. They thought effort had a posture. Straight back, eyes forward, pencil moving. They never saw the miles I was walking.

Daydreaming took concentration. It took stamina. It took the discipline of holding a thread and not letting it break. I remember how exhausting it was to keep a story alive while pretending to copy notes. How much more work it required to imagine a better world than to memorize the dimensions of a worse one. Laziness was never the problem. Laziness is easy. What I was doing was not easy. It just wasn’t assigned.

I know this now because I became a teacher. Because I stand where they once stood, holding attendance sheets and objectives. And I see it: the vacant gaze that isn’t vacant at all, the student doing invisible work, the mind creating something the administration did not authorize. The awful truth is not that we failed to stop the daydreamers; it is that we never tried to understand what they were building, or why. We measured work only by what could be collected, graded, archived. Anything that couldn’t be stapled was suspect.

As a child, I lived entire lifetimes before lunch. I mattered to people who did not exist except because I loved them into being. I saved cities. I made mistakes and learned from them without ruining my real life. I was allowed to rehearse goodness, courage, devotion. I practiced being someone who could show up. Those worlds made me sincere. They made me hopeful. They made me believe that what I felt inside would one day find a door in the real world and step through.

I grew up.
And the door did not open the way I thought it would.

I now reach for those images and my hands come back empty. The rooms are still there, but the lights won’t turn on. I try to imagine a future and it feels like pressing my face to frosted glass. I know something is there, but I can’t see it clearly enough to love it. Responsibility has weight. Time has teeth, and imagination now feels like a muscle that went unused and forgot its own strength.

Except there was a moment.
When I was in love.

For a brief, dangerous stretch of time, the childish dreams leaned toward reality. The stories I used to tell myself began to resemble plans. I could see a life where my sincerity was useful, where my inner worlds had an address. Loving someone felt like being given permission to believe again. I thought: this is how it happens, and this is how imagination graduates.

And then it didn’t.
It stopped short.
The story ended midway.

What hurts is not just the loss of love, but the way it took those worlds with it. As if imagination itself decided it was unsafe to come out anymore. As if the child in me learned the wrong lesson: not that dreams can fail, but that they should never be trusted to speak aloud.

Sometimes I still catch myself drifting, even now. In meetings. In quiet evenings. For a second, I feel the old effort return—the focus, the mumble, the almost. I want to tell that child they weren’t wrong. That the work they were doing mattered. That even if the stories never became real, they taught me how to care deeply, how to imagine others fully, how to love without needing proof.

I don’t daydream the way I used to.
But I am still made of that effort.
And some days, that has to be enough.