I was walking along the Thames on a grey, blustery afternoon when I saw her, a small girl throwing pebbles into the wind as if she meant to win. She had picked a fight with the east wind and hadn’t yet worked out she couldn’t win it. Every stone she threw, the wind caught and flung straight back to her feet, and every time it happened she huffed, squared up, and threw again. She was so locked onto the contest that she didn’t notice her dog had wandered off along the bank without her.
I almost told her. It’s the east wind, I nearly said. You can’t beat that. Something stopped me.
My world has always worked differently to most people’s. Some people remember everything that happens to them, every ordinary day filed away in order. I remember my dreams the same way, sometimes better. I dream in full, in colour, in sequence, my past folded in with things that haven’t happened yet, and I’ve never worked out which parts are memory and which parts are still owed to me.
Dreams are better than real life, if you let them be. In a dream you can build a ship from nothing, hold a weapon that isn’t a weapon at all, say the one word that undoes gravity, stand your ground against something with teeth. You can be, for as long as it lasts, the version of yourself that never once has to apologise for taking up space. You can be a hero.
So I didn’t tell her about the wind. I thought instead, what if she already knows how to dream herself out of losing. What if, tonight, she turns herself into something with the strength of a catapult and puts a stone clean across the river, close enough to startle the man playing his pipe on the far bank. She could do that. Not here. But somewhere, she absolutely could.
These are the stories that live in that somewhere. The boring ones, the ones nobody remembers asking for, the ones that happen anyway.
I should give the girl a name before we go any further. She was confident in the particular way only children and the truly reckless manage, funny in a way you’d only catch if you watched her with her dog long enough, and stubborn enough to keep arguing with weather. Long dark hair, green eyes that missed nothing. Let’s call her Becca.
Becca. Let’s dream.