Chapter 1
I am running through a dimly-lit corridor. I don’t know why I’m here, nor what I’m running from, but the ground underneath my feet seems to be disappearing as I run.
There is a white, glistening door at its end. My head is full of questions, my feet are stomping away and as one replaces the other, I take a final leap towards my salvation. As I reach it, I grab the handle and swing it open only to be met by a painfully familiar figure in a blue medical gown although I don’t recollect who it is.
I can’t feel the floor underneath me anymore as I stand outside of the doorway, somehow still able to be at the same level with the doctor. His face is very blurry, nonetheless, I still get the feeling I’ve seen him somewhere before.
“He died.”
These two short, but stinging words so effortlessly pronounced by the man in blue are enough to make me realize the truth. And as an overwhelming feeling of panic, fear and hopelessness swallows me whole and makes my thoughts race… the figure’s deep, raspy voice echoing in my mind, I break off into the darkness, trying to scream with all my might but somehow failing, my sorrowful being getting farther and farther away from the ill-fated door…
I jump up in my train seat, gasping for air. I can feel the lump in my throat growing, tears building up and threatening to spill due to yet another day terror.
The perception of bad dreams by most people is that, yes. It is stressful when you are sleeping, but when you wake up, the realization that nothing in the nightmare itself was actually materialistic and real relieves the pressure. You can, quickly forgetting about it, go on with your day.
For me and the type of nightmares I’ve been having lately, this is not the case.
As my surroundings begin to feel more real with each passing second, I try to calm myself with an anxiety-coping technique I learned a while ago.
Erica, concentrate... Come on, five things you see.
I let my eyes roam around the train.
The window. What is behind the window? A few cypresses. Okay, that is two. There is a table in front of me—three—on which a San Pellegrino water bottle is positioned. Right, number five?
I look down.
My bag.
I take a deep breath and feel the liquid in my eyes slowly retreating.
Four things you can touch, go.
I raise my hands up to my face and feel its curves. Then I touch the slightly rough fabric of my seat. I’ve always wondered what they were made of as a kid. I reach for my bag and sense it, then find my beloved polaroid camera in its depths and place my fingers against its smooth surface.
Three things you can hear.
The wheels of the train coming in contact with the train tracks. Two middle-aged women chatting in Italian behind me. And also…
“Excuse me, Miss, are you okay?” a manly, interrogative voice interrupts my thought flow, fluent Italian flowing out of his mouth.
I turn to its source, my eyes widening in fear of sudden appeal, and realize that the middle-aged man in a beige trilby and striped brown summer shirt, sitting in the seat across from mine is not, in fact, asleep.
“Ugh… Yeah, I’m fine,” I mumble out in his language.
His eyebrows take the shape of a triangle.
“Bad dream?”
Has he been watching me the entire time?
Reluctant about responding, I look away to the side and decide to give a brief answer quietly.
“Yeah, I have been having nightmares lately.”
It’s been one or two months since these bad dreams began to haunt me. The thing is, my grandpa from my mum’s side died three years ago, when I was fifteen. I was very close to him, and, yes, it was hard for me to go through all the stages of grief after his death, but I never had to deal with nightmare visions with doctors and hospitals as their content. No kidding, I’ve had a surgeon chase me with a scalpel a couple of times and yell out the same phrase that surfaced in my last dream. Frankly, that’s when I knew things started to get serious.
“I see. Bad dreams are just visions that our consciousness decides to throw in sometimes. At least it’s all over now,” the corner of his mouth lifts up reassuringly.
But I don’t share his optimism whatsoever. When I experience a nightmare about my grandpa and wake up in cold sweat, I never feel like it’s over. It serves me as a constant reminder that he is no longer with me. Lifting an entire stratum of memories of the time the ill-fated doctor came out of that stupid hospital door and told me and my family about the disaster that had just occurred.
“I guess,” I mutter, smiling nonetheless, as I look up at him gratefully for his effort.
But the sympathetic discourse ends when I turn my head to the window shortly, letting him know that I am not in the mood to continue developing the discussion.
What I didn’t realize right after waking up though, is how breath-taking Italy is. As I was desperately trying to recover from the night terror minutes before, I looked at that one cypress and moved on. All along, there was much more to the view than a single tree.
I see flourishing fields passing me by with entire rows of evergreen cypresses sticking out here and there. Rising above the opalescent lands, like great, ferocious titans, are the enormous, chromatic hills and mountains. It feels like they are overlooking their kingdom, making sure that everything is how it is supposed to be: calm and peaceful. Above this oasis, is the sky, settled over it like a shielding dome. Floating in the midst of it are the albescent, voluminous clouds, scattered all over the deep blue canvas.
Whenever I get genuinely inspired by something beautiful, my worries become a little less than what they have been moments ago. That’s why I get so freaking poetic in my mind.
Although I have been living in Genoa for six years now, Italy still feels so different from England, my homeland. Throughout their entire relationship and marriage, my British parents had a dream to move to Italy one day. They used to almost literally swirl a hole through mine and my brother’s brains, constantly going off about how wonderful it is to live in Southern Europe, until (to my demise and misery, as I, very sadly, lost the bet to Theo) they took the leap and got us all the way to the Ligurian coast, enrolling me and my sibling into a regular Italian school and finding new jobs for themselves. I’m happy though, as I was able to learn a new language and speak it freely, which I wanted to do for a while now. I sometimes think I am more fluent in Italian than English.
To this day, London with its bitter, numbing breezes and overall clamminess almost all year round feels like the ideal climate for me. Which is probably why I usually get salty when I sense an unbearable craving to take a shower every twenty minutes. Especially during summertime, and, it, coincidentally, is currently the middle of June.
Being zoned out for some time, my eyes suddenly focus on my reflection in the window. A relatively young girl with a heart-shaped face and big hazel eyes stares back at me. Sparkles of excitement are burning in her irises. Two straight, lengthy strands of ash-coloured hair are resting on her eyelashes, the rest of her mane hidden behind her in a ponytail. I usually like to criticize the way I look because of some imperfections on my face that I find hideous but now, even in a reflection in a filthy train window, I find myself unusually pretty.
As I smile to my thoughts and the sides of my lips start to slowly curl up, two deepenings surface on both sides of my cheeks.
Yes, I have dimples. And my friends and parents tell me that they add a heap of sweetness to my looks, but I don’t share the same opinion.
The last hints of a smile leave my face as I ponder on this matter.
I focus back on the gorgeous environment the machine takes me through, silently picking on a nail cuticle. It makes me think of how crazy it is that less than a month ago I graduated from high school. This became a big topic for my English childhood friends to jokingly annoy me about, like how they are already enrolled in various universities and “my ‘smol’ self, a baby”, has just finished school.
In fact, I even decided to take a gap year after my graduation. The passion of my life – photography, is what I want to practice for this time. Simultaneously using the opportunity to travel. I’m so glad those two things go hand in hand if you want them to, which is why I woke up on a train, among all places.
Where am I going, you might ask? Well currently, I’m on my way to a small town on the coast of Cinque Terre – Levanto. Honestly speaking, according to the internet and if compared to the abundance of incredibly gorgeous places in Italy in general, Levanto isn’t the best place to go to if one wants to get a ton of aesthetically pleasing shots. But I figured that I should start small, as small as that town is. There aren’t a lot of people and tourists too which would make it easier for me to concentrate on the sole beauty of the place itself.
As I think about photography, I realize it could be cool to get a polaroid of the train window and the view behind it, for memories. But I don’t know if the stained glass of the window will end up ruining the shot or will add a special charm to it.
You’ll never know if you don’t try.
I take my polaroid camera out of my bag carefully, placing the small apparatus’ viewfinder close to my right eye. As I find the perfect perspective of the view, my index finger applies pressure to the shutter button and a clicking sound resonates.
I frown. The image that appears on the display of the camera is utterly hideous, I must say. The ugly splatter of yellow does not go with the magical landscape behind it. Guess I still have a lot to learn. (And no, I did not come so far to take white-collar pictures with just a polaroid cam – I have a professional one too, just that I don’t use it for personal shots.)
I suddenly hear a female voice announce that the train will be arriving to Levanto in five minutes. Packing my stuff up, in a short time I am ready to head out. Which I do when the train comes to a halt. The “white trilby hat” guy watches me closely as I get up and drag my light blue suitcase to the exit.
Is he a creep? Or is he genuinely concerned about me?
I walk out into the scalding sun, being slightly blinded by the train station reflecting the sunlight. Engulfed by the fresh salty sea breeze, I close my eyes and let the feeling of being alone and completely free in a different city sink in. I even forget that I don’t like hot weather for a few seconds.
“You can’t block exits at train stations!”
Oh no.
I fling my eyes open in surprise and move aside without even looking at the person addressing me. A rather voluptuous woman with a greasy bun of black hair grumpily walks past me, giving out a slight ‘humph’. Her voice did sound feminine but very rough.
I head towards the entrance to the train station’s building, examining my surroundings. I did not expect its exterior to be very clean when travelling here, but it is safe to say that everything looks neat, along with the alluring pine tree-covered hills rising in the distance.
There aren’t a lot of people both on the outside and the inside of the train station. I look around, trying to find the familiar figure of my landlord I followed on social media a while ago. But Francesca is nowhere to be found. What puzzles me more is that the train was a little late, and yet, she is still nowhere to be seen. I stop somewhere on the side, taking out my phone to call her.
A female voice answers. Background noise is heard from the other side of the line, as if there is a lot of people gathered in one place.
“Hello Francesca! Are you at the train station?” I bite my lip as I start to think that our plan is not so relevant anymore.
“Hello, this is Francesca’s sister speaking. I am sorry to inform you that she is not able to answer the phone herself as she is…um…at the maternity home, in the process of giving birth.”
I open my mouth in shock. She did seem to be pregnant on the pictures on Instagram, but it’s weird she did not go into labour before the big birth-giving day itself.
“Oh, okay…Uh, it’s just that—”
“She will call you back herself in a few hours, I am really sorry for the inconvenience.”
A combination of voices is heard through the phone and the woman answers them, ending the call in a few moments.
I stand there, slowly putting my phone down into my pocket.
Great.
