Chiara C. CW

“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.” -Langston Hughes

Who am I? I am a dream. I have not yet taken shape, and I’m discovering myself. My many feelings, thoughts, and memories do not have a set form yet. But I know that when they do, and I know who I really am, I’ll be spectacular.

I am fiercely loyal to those I love. I care for all my family and friends. Like a cat, I like to think I’m aloof and independent. But I’m not. I am very social, but one of my irrational fears is that people I’m friendly with actually think something bad about me. Maybe it’s because I have such an active imagination-- I can dream up anything.

I read so many books, there’s not even room on my bookshelves for all of them anymore! I like studying the subjects of science and math, and the multiverse theory is fascinating to me. I like to imagine that in another universe, all my wishes are possible. Of course, I love fantasy books and those with other worlds and magic. My dream is to travel all over the world someday and see everything it has to offer, every beautiful country.

I’m private, even with myself. I don’t like writing about myself. I can’t really understand my own thoughts, untangle the web of whatever makes up me. I prefer, if I have to write, to analyze what I see. That’s easy to write about, and I can put more detail into it and make it sound beautiful. But when I write about myself, it feels like I’m just taking out pieces at random and examining them. You have to see the whole picture to get a good idea of me, and sometimes there’s a part of my personality that I don’t want the world to see me as, or even to see myself as sometimes, but I never want to take it out of the picture. I have very deep feelings that vary a lot. I can be struck by a small moment, or let a large one not affect me at all. It depends what I put value into. I love small moments when there isn’t so much thinking as feeling, whether watching a sunset, looking up at a huge city full of light at night, or seeing a snow-covered, silent forest as daylight shines across it. I am made up of a million small moments—every dream, memory, wish, idea and second change, shape, and define me.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” -William Shakespeare

Who am I? Everyone is different, and I am just one person, shining and confident and full of light. As a dream, I don’t know exactly what I am or what I will be. I just know what I can guess of myself. It’s like looking in a mirror— you see what you look like, but maybe that isn’t how others see you. It’s like being someone else and trying to guess what I see in the mirror of myself. I have a thousand reflections, some I don’t know and some I keep inside, but I love them all.