“You know one more thing about main characters? They have vivid dreams that are very specific to the situation.”
I am watching a film with my teenage sister, a popular fantasy movie that she loves and I have never seen. The female protagonist has just met, and been saved by, a sarcastic and mysterious non-human boy. I’m guessing the character tropes (I already know that the two of them will fall in love).
“There’s going to be a love triangle, right? Who’s the other guy?”
“It’s her best friend, of course!” 
Check.
“The nerdy best friend?”
“Yep.” 
Check.
“And he undergoes a transformation and gets more attractive, no?”
“Yeah. He becomes a vampire.” 
Check.
“Okay, back to her. She’s going to develop super rare superpowers.”
“Yes.”
“At least one of her parents is gone.”
“She doesn’t know who her father is, and her mom has disappeared.” 
Check, check.
I am writing a story about myself, but right now I’m lacking all the prerequisites of a typical main character: nothing is happening to me. I am locked inside my house, and my family gets along fairly well. I spend most of my time studying. I’m not planning on breaking the law anytime soon. I talk to most of my friends often, and a lot of them I haven’t seen in many months. But I do dream about them almost every night. This is the one main character trait that I have left; my dreams are as vivid as the sunsets of my hometown, and after waking up I remember them like happy memories. But some of them are not that pleasant.

My mum is taking me to the airport with my siblings, who are somehow younger than they are in reality, and nervous and very hard to tame. I have to check into a flight, but I have no idea how, and I don’t know my destination, so my mum is doing it for me. One of my siblings starts to cry, so mum leaves me to it, and I have trouble scanning the codes. I am blocking the queue. When she comes back I think I have mostly managed, but as it turns out I’ve done it wrong.
“I am coming to Valencia with you, and then you’re taking the second flight alone,” my mum tells me.
“Okay, I didn’t know that,” I answer.

The near future of our society is uncertain, and so is mine. I don’t know where I’ll be in five months, nor if I’ll be allowed to leave my current location. In mid-March I filled half a suitcase with books and the remaining half with clothes and essential items, then I flew back home – a town in Northern Italy – to be with my family. Here it almost feels like summer; a cruel, eternal summer with schoolwork to do and nowhere to go. The sun tries to soak up our blues. I feel at home here in this house, which is more than I can say about London during the last few weeks before I left.
Another main character trait: I moved away from where I grew up; but the story should have started when I first left, not when I came back home because the world has come to a halt. One usually writes about leaving, not coming back, because coming back sounds like a walk of shame after a one-night stand with your dream future. I don’t feel ashamed about being back in Italy for an indeterminate period of time – it wasn’t exactly my choice – but I do think about leaving again.

Crimson Baby and I are packing up; we have to stay in Holland (I think) for a period, and my mum will take us to the airport soon. Crimson Baby is wearing black shorts, a dark t-shirt, and sneakers. Her hair is up in a bun. I am wearing an oversized orange hoodie, and as we pack clothes I keep asking myself why the hell I’m taking this hoodie – I hate wearing orange – to then remember that all my other hoodies are in London, and I’ll need one for sure. We are now loading our bags into the trunk of the car, and my grandparents come to say goodbye. They are surrounded by strange creatures; iridescent and rainbow coloured flying fish, white flamingos with glittery feathers that can actually fly, and a small indigo bird that has the strength to lift me from the ground with its beak. I am suspended for a bit, until the little creature lets go of me. Crimson Baby and I get into the car.

Last week I saw Crimson Baby, my best friend, for the first time since I came back. I called her and she greeted me from the window, then ran downstairs. It felt as forbidden as Romeo climbing up to Juliet’s balcony. We talked for a while through the iron gates, raising our voices so the other could hear. We are about to graduate, and neither of us knows shit about our future. We have idea-plans, but we cannot decide if they are what we actually want or only compromises. We speak of compromise as a balance between what we want to do in life and what we should do, between dream-shaped ideas and pragmatic realities. I speak of balance as ephemeral and rather hard to find; she speaks of it as bullshit and something that we (as a society) have made up. We are both a little big-headed.
“Let’s do a test,” says Crimson Baby. “Write your possible plans on different pieces of paper and fold them up. Then you hold one between your thumb and index. I will try to separate your fingers, and if your muscles give in, then it’s not the right choice for you.”
I’m actually about to slightly break the law by touching her hand. Another main character point for me.
“Okay, let’s do that.”
I write down my possible plans, and we try with the three different pieces of paper. My fingers don’t release them.
“Whatever you choose, it’s right for you. That’s good,” she says.
“Shall we test your options?”
“No, maybe another time.” Her voice sounds clipped.
She isn’t exactly scared, I know, but she has trouble believing in her ideas. Our plans are paper-thin, quite literally. And whatever we choose, this near future will require a lot of compromise.

There is a dream inside the dream. In the embedded one, I stand in a site of ancient ruins with overgrown grass that is somehow limited, as if it were a stage. Only the ruins are real, and they just happen to dissolve into nothing outside of a rectangular perimeter. As I walk around, people arrive –some pop up out of nowhere, some enter from outside the perimeter. My parents, my friends, my grandparents, and some old acquaintances are here. As I move from one to the other, I learn that I can walk through things while still looking like a real person. I am either a dream or a ghost.
“Look, I am insubstantial!” I tell my mum as I push my leg into a pillar. “I think this is my dream.” 
Then my mum points to the left, where two boys are running towards us. She yells their names, and I recognise them as boy of the woods and his best friend. I realise that I haven’t seen them in a very long time, and that they might hate me now, and that now is not the right time for me to know if that’s the case.
“No, this is when the dream becomes a nightmare”, I say, and I run in the opposite direction. When I reach the perimeter, I dissolve into nothing.

My sister is preparing to spend the next year in America with a host family, if the world will allow it. There she is, about to become the protagonist of her life story.
“I can’t wait to go visit you over there,” mum told her when she got accepted.
“Don’t you dare,” she answered through her teeth, half-joking.
Living in America has always been one of her dreams, eager as she is of running away, and the same was for me. I lived there for a semester, and I’ve been itching to go back for months. I can’t wait to visit again, but I’m also fucking scared.
It is there in America that I met boy of the woods and his friends – they were my friends too then. I fell in love with him, this boy who was so out of place in the city but so good at pretending otherwise, and I was also a little in love with the friends that I found there. I took pictures of them on a disposable camera that was given to me by Lilly, my friend who came with me from London. She was the real photographer; I was just a kid playing around with the flash. Before leaving London this March, I took all the photographs off the wall of my bedroom. Here, I reorganised all the pictures from that year and taped them to a photo album. Even though I’ve had a lot of time on my hands, I stopped at the pictures from May, right after I had come back from the semester abroad.

I am on a train with a lot of people. A girl is painting colourful portraits of all of us; we’ve almost reached our destination, and now I’m dancing around and singing with Andre, an old friend –we’re having fun. Someone hints at the fact that we might be into each other; I don’t answer but think, “don’t you know that he’s got a boyfriend?”
When we get off, I recognise the place; it’s a meadow up between the mountains, and there’s an open building that is either a mountain cable station or an airport. I have already been here, in another dream. I think I was on my way to America then.

That time in America was made of the same stuff that dreams are made of, and its ending felt like one –a weird, oneiric grouping of people from different parts and places of my life that somehow came together. On the day I last saw boy of the woods I also saw Andre, a boy I’ve known since I was seven and that I have loved for one third of my life –the only other person I’ve been in love with. We met up in the American city where we were both living at the time, on the other side of the world from where we grew up. Life is a funny thing sometimes –I felt like a main character back then.

There are usually two principal elements to my conscious dreams, wether they are daydreams or dream-goals. I picture what I’d like to be doing (a variation of perfect jobs and life situations), and who I’d like to be doing it with (sometimes a particular face, sometimes an abstract prototype of a person or people). Sometimes I wonder if having the courage to find a dream to chase is good enough, if half of the work is done when I start to have faith in it, but sometimes the dream disappears as fast as it had manifested and I find myself empty-handed. I blink, and I’m not holding the hand I’d like to be holding, I have too much time on my hands instead; so I get to work, and I put my mind and fingers to good use. Maybe it’s time to hold a familiar old hand. Time to make my old dreams into new ones.  

I am in the car with Crimson Baby. We’re driving around a village in the mountains, and we end up by the seaside somehow. We park and make our way towards the cafe, and I see boy of the woods sitting at a table with his family. His mum is beautiful. It is almost twilight, and the golden light is coming right through from behind him –I can barely see his face. We leave.

“I don’t understand if these plans I’m making are new dreams or a compromise between my old dreams and reality,” Crimson Baby told me once. As for me, I think that my old dreams were compromises, and my new ones are not.
Now I cannot move from my house, but I dream. I dream to cover the distance, when I’m awake or when I’m asleep. I dream about leaving, and about airports and people far away whom I haven’t seen for the longest time, but also about those that are a car drive away and I still cannot see. I long for all of that; I did before we were obliged to stay still and inside, and I do now. I dream of what I want and of what I fear; often, they’re two sides of the same coin.
“You’re definitely not a main character according to your personality. You’re more of a side character,” my sister tells me the day after we’ve watched the film.
“Yeah, I know. Either that or the one who gets killed first,” I counter.
“And I’m either the villain or the killer.”
“Brag about it, won’t you!”
She snickers. “Well, look at the bright side. You’re a bit boring, but I’m sure you have an interesting backstory that the protagonist doesn’t care about, which we never get to know.”
“Okay, fair. I’m fine with a cool backstory.”
“Maybe you even get a spin-off!” she yells.
“Yeah, that’d be nice. We’ll see.”

Originally published on In The Midst Of It: The KCL
Creative Writing Society Anthology, January 2021

Crimson Baby, disappearing like a dream in the morning