They name it the Dream City because it hasn’t been built. The park is designed to look like a park. The zoo, a zoo. The museum started planning an exhibition of inkwells to celebrate the one year anniversary of the museum before the museum was designed. This could be a fiction so wide they built a river to fill it. But it’s not. The river was always there. We want the city to be the kind of city the little girl will feel nostalgic about when both happy and depressed. All her colors will be based on the colors of that city. And now the temporary is already seeming permanent: a good sign.

There is a lake and it is the third biggest in the world if we say it is. There have been drownings, accidental, all caused by over-admiration. (Lack of admiration can be equally dangerous.) The police are already stationed in the most beautiful spots to make them a little less lovely and thereby protect us.

I need protecting. I will move into any idea faster than onto a long-awaited city-to-city bus. You like this about me, but I find it a terrible quality in you. After seeing the exhibition of writings by old men in our city you say let’s become old men. We shut the TV off and you say let’s argue. About what. About the Dream City. And then we decide to put the little things off until the city is finished and we go.