I sat there sliding down in the wooden pew style bench, cappuccino forgotten pushed back to the edge of the small table, hazily looking around enveloped in the crisp dry basic inky smell of newspaper. Occasionally I peered over it at El Capitán and the woman with mischief in her eyes. I had met him maybe two years ago in a suburb of Mexico City. Here his face was so out of place and fit in so well with the perpetual turnover of latin chess players that rolled through that it took time with the smell of another place and the freshness of newspaper ink to realize why I recognized him. However, such a simple thing of saying hello was difficult --you would think it was an audacity. Layered with the smells and the memory of that suburb I couldn't help but overhear the conversation next to me discussing a dream and the haziness of real life and how could one know for sure if life is a dream and that the dream which was so much more real, more saturated in color and more rich in every way. How could one know if this was the dream or that was the dream. This the pale, uninteresting, lifeless "life" why was it more real, more substantial when it felt the other way.