Midnight Blue, Sunrise Gold

Power to the Local Dreamer

Hope was a sad girl. At least, that's what people thought about her. She enjoyed solitude, so people thought she was depressed. That's how teenagers think, I guess.

She was quiet, she was calm. She didn't like people too much. All she'd ever want to talk about was outer space, or aliens, or both. People said she was a bit like an alien. She wasn't quite with it, they said. Hope supposed they were right, but she didn't mind.

She did love to talk about space, though. She could never quite get it into her head that there were billions of lightyears of planets, stars, life. It never ceased to amaze her. And it was all so beautiful and amazing, it wasn't just fiction, it was there. She hoped one day to be able to see the moon, close up, with her own eyes. Power to the local dreamer.

She wasn't sure she believed in a God. She thought of it was lovely, the idea of someone watching over her and taking care of her, but she didn't think it likely. She entertained the idea, now and again, when she was feeling particularly alone. She thought it didn't matter either way.

Though she pretended not to, Hope cared intensely about her appearance. She didn't worry about her face or her weight, because she knew those were things she couldn't change. She cared about if her hair would flow in the wind and hands were soft. She cared about the intensity of her stare and the way she smiled. She cared a lot.

After all this, you'd suppose Hope would be incredibly sensitive, or that she'd had some kind of a tragic past. I'm afraid, if you did, then you were entirely wrong. Hope was one of the most genuinely happy people you'd ever meet. Because she wasn't a sad girl at all, she was a girl of wonder and dreams and magic.

She loved films, old sci-fi films, stories about things clinging on to life, Frankenstein-type things, you know? She had a love for musicals too; the Sound of Music, Singing in the Rain, everything.

Her music taste was small. She'd never needed music , so she never looked far. She checked the top 40 every so often, listened to her sister's Ellie Goulding albums, but that was about it.

Hope loved life more than anyone else I've ever known. She could never understand how people could take their own lives, when they still had the moon to gaze at and the grass to touch and the world to explore. She'd always say she wondered why you'd ever leave a world of everything for a world of nothing.