The place where all dreams come true

by Alfonsina Betancourt

 When I was fifteen I discovered that sometimes life showers us with gifts that might come in an unrecognizable wrapper.

I was a - maybe unusual - serious teenager. Great student, president of the Student Government, was already studying painting so I could become the artist I wanted to be. I was basically a good, responsible girl. I don’t mean it in an arrogant way because the truth is that I was so mature that I feel I never got to experience what I was suppose to live during the precious years of adolescence. That was actually my handicap. 

Stargazing was one of my favorite pastimes those days. Every night I would stay for hours by the window with my binoculars learning the name of the constellations with the help of an Astronomy book my mom had bought.  Soon after I started learning about the stories that originated the stars’ names. That is how my obsession with Greek Mythology started. 

Those were the days pre-internet so I had to rely in my faithful Encyclopedia Britannica, which for a curious girl like me it was the equivalent of the Bible of Wisdom. Funny how we got trained to fish for information before Google made our lives easier and scarier!  Then came the Joseph Campell and Pierre Grimal books. But whatever I found seemed to have incomplete information. So I started making alphabetical list of all of Greek deities, the stories related to them, their equivalent name in Roman Mythology and even how some of those myths were adapted by the Nordic or other Folk Tales.  That was very nerdy and time-consuming stuff but I decided to write my first book then: A dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology.

I pitched the idea to my dad saying that I really needed to do some on-site research. He laughed at first, but besides being a relatively frugal man, there were two things he never spared at: education and technology, maybe not in that order. I suggested that since I was too young to travel on my own, I could go with my sister who was already twenty years-old, and we could spend one week in Italy and another one in Greece. I don’t know how, but we were able to convince him and so it became the planning of my dream-like, most-extravagant-ever Fifteenth Birthday gift.  

My sister and I in Rome, 1992

My sister and I in Rome, 1992

As if the Universe was testing us, the whole planning process seemed like a nightmare. Doors kept closing, everything became vey difficult. After months of planning, a week before we were set to leave we were still not sure we would be able to make it.  A friend told me something that stuck with me, “Are you going to Rome? Rome is the city where all dreams come true.” From all the cameras my dad collected he gave us an old Minolta to record every moment. And that is how a July afternoon we got embarked in the trip that taught me to be open to what the universe brings.

To our surprise, our uncle who worked at Alitalia got us a surprising upgrade, so my sister, who also happened to be my best friend, and I were not only super excited, we were also sipping champagne and laughing at our luck. That was until we landed at Fiumicino Airport. The travel agency was supposed to send a driver that wasn’t there, we got lost, finally we got in a taxi that did not know where our hotel was and kept saying that it was probably a shitty place because he had never heard about it, while we frightenedly looked at the taximeter eat our money. To our surprise, our room was on the fifth floor in a building without elevator. Two girls climbing a tiny staircase with our ridiculously gigantic luggage, jet lagged, hungry. The room was so tiny that we could barely fit. I just wanted to cry! It seemed that all the inconvenient we experienced during the planning process were just a warning of how the trip was going to go. I sat down on the corner of the hard rock bed, exhausted, while my sister inspected the tiny bathroom. But there was an extra black metal door. We decided to open it and there it was: our own big terrace overlooking the city of Rome, where all dreams are supposed to come true. I felt I couldn’t breathe. It was so beautiful, and unexpected, and amusing. All the red roofs, the nearby balconies, that smell of cigarette and perfume mixed with the begonias that were blooming on terra-cotta vases. I never knew I dreamed to be in a place like that but up after that moment that \ became one of my favorite “Wishes-do-come-true” instant. 

At that moment I realized that dreams sometimes impersonate goals. They become the bull’s eye, the bucket list items we need to achieve. As if our whole happiness depends on it. But there are dreams that become the bait that lures us into winding roads where we find that we don’t even knew we wanted. But the universe is generous and gives them to us even if we haven’t asked for them.  Not all in life is a manifestation of our desires, some gifts surprises us, mostly because we were not expecting them. As if they came wrapped in trashy paper, sometimes we have no idea what they would represent in our life until much later.

“ Dreams come and go, they change and evolve, but as long as we are willing to keep our arms open, the universe will never stop showering us with gifts. ”

The trip ended up being like a Pandora Box, wonderful and disastrous at the same time. The Minolta camera stopped working on the second day of our vacation so we barely have any record of it - which made some of my friends back home doubt that we even went in the first place. Much of the original Greek and Italian Art I was hoping to see was displayed in Paris and London, so in its place I saw replicas; I never got to write the Mythology book because I realized that my interest were in the stories themselves and in the way they inspire us to be heroes rather than in the research; I discovered that traveling with my sister was a beautiful bonding experience; I realized for the first time that I wanted to experience living in a different city. Although I came back to Rome in several opportunities afterwards, I never found it as charming as that first time. From all the things I learned and cherished from that trip, the most important one was that it gave me the capacity to believe that sometimes we find black doors that hide the most wonderful gifts; gifts that change our life even when were not expecting them. Dreams come and go, they change and evolve, but as long as we are willing to keep our arms open, the universe will never stop showering us with gifts. Locations are irrelevant as long we are willing to be surprised, because no matter where we are or how we get there, a dream-come-true is only one door away. 

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