By the age of sixteen, every girl weaves a dream for herself — “I’m going to get out of here.” Why, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps the bloody contraption nestled beneath her ribcage wants to pump blood that aches for foreign air. Perhaps she no longer wishes to be constrained by the suffocating manacles of societal pressure. Perhaps she plans to prove everyone wrong by reaching a place they never expected her to. Whatever the reason, such flights of fancy are ridden by the lion’s share of teenage minds: to take a swig of the most expensive wine while perusing the teeming thoroughfares of Edinburgh; to admire the masterstrokes of architecture under the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica; to adjust the flattened sleeves of a kimono as fireworks glimmer across the cosmic abyss in Tokyo. The list never ends, and it never should. Life is built of miracles, of bricks that anoint the creator’s fingers with the cement of splendor. So why settle for small, “achievable” desires?
But dreaming is far easier than turning that distant fantasy into reality. Dreaming is far easier than confronting life’s harshness. The naive sixteen‑year‑old quickly becomes a captive of her early twenties, juggling academics, family, friends, and, of course, the will to survive. She wakes up every day like clockwork, a cog in a wheel, a dime a dozen—out of habit, not out of rest, repeating a routine that long ago stopped feeling like living. She scrolls through Instagram reels while her mind reverberates with the reminder, “Get a job!” She looks at her reflection and sees a woman far from the one‑way ticket to her little la‑la land. Sometimes she sits on the cold, welcoming floor and wonders, “How do I make it stop? How do I halt this incessant spiral of helplessness? I’m too old. I’ve passed the age of catching my flight. I’m unemployed, I feel dumb, and a single bad grade disarms me completely.”
Then a snide remark invades her bubble of grief—something from a relative she doesn’t hold dear, something from the searing, delicate flesh she’s built from, something from an authoritative figure she deeply admires. And she begins to blaze with the anger of breaking free again.
A decade from now, if fate is kind to her and she is rude to it, she will make it. God, I pray she does. If she doesn’t—however heartbreakingly—she will pretend she gave up on that dream long ago. She will feign insouciance, as all mortals do to keep from falling apart, and grab a glass of wine as if she doesn’t see a reflection of Edinburgh in it. She will stare at the gold‑rimmed portrait that blinds her vision with the curves and swoops of the Renaissance and act as though there’s not a single fragment of Rome in it. She will go through her closet, glimpse the moth‑eaten kimono, and steel her heart to pretend she doesn’t care much for it.
But they will hook her up to a polygraph and ask her if she wants to get out of here, and she will say “no,” yet the needle will jump and sputter exactly the way the lights of an airplane glitter.