I wandered through Regent’s Park before heading home, mulling over the play and the little girl who had believed just a bit too much. But had she really? Hadn’t she been asked – just minutes before – to believe in Tinker Bell, the same way we’re all asked to believe whenever we take our seats in an amphitheater or a darkened auditorium?

In the middle of a path off to my right, I saw a red-haired kid gleefully brandishing a long stick while his father demanded that the youngster hand over his sword. When he would not, the father wrestled the sword out from out of the kid’s fists, held it over his head with both hands, and then—knowing, but not quite believing, what was coming—I saw him break it in two and fling the pieces into the big trash bin beside him. The kid stared up at him, disbelieving, and started to sob—huge, abrupt, wracking sobs, as if an actual adversary had actually triumphed by breaking a sword over his head.

Had that happened?

Had that really happened, or had it not—and, if not, why did it feel so real to me? Why did it feel so real to the tiny red-headed soldier, whose crumpling face I could still envision, while, disoriented, I made my way out of the park with the words of Virginia Woolf layered over the mother’s singing children’s songs and Peter flying on ropes, and that girl shouting “NO!”, and Septimus with his fantastical visions of dogs becoming men, of learning the truth of life, while his wife wished his madness would stop?

And I thought back to the summers we spent in the backyard, where my siblings picked onion grass and wild strawberries and jousted with long, crooked sticks, half-believing the hammock-turned-vertical truly had the power to imprison us, as our fingers grasped the netting and we shouted for the villain to set us free.

Alona R. Bach ’16 is a history of science concentrator in Cabot House.