THE DREAMS WE SHARED

Chapter one

Chapter one

Before we met

Amaya had always believe that dreams were supposed to scare you a little.

If a dream was easy, she thought, maybe it wasn't big enough.

At fifteen, she already knew exactly what you wanted to become.

A FILM DIRECTOR.

Not a doctor, not a lawyer, not an engineer.

But a film director.

She wanted to stand behind a camera and turn words into something people could see and feel. She wanted to create stories that made people laugh, cry, think and most importantly, feel understood.

But there was one problem.

Almost nobody around her believed she could do it.

"Amaya, you're still thinking about that film thing?"

She looked up from the note book on her lap.

Her father stood in the doorway, watching her with the same concerned expression he had worn many times before.

"It's not a film thing," Amaya said. "It's my future."

Her father sighed.

"Your future needs a proper plan"

Amaya closed her notebook.

"I have a plan"

"you're fifteen".

"And "

"And you don't know what life is going to look like five years from now."

Amaya stood up.

"Maybe I didn't. But I know what I want."

Her father shook his head gentle.

"You're stubborn", he said.

Amaya smiled.

"I know".

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Then her father left the room

Amaya looked down at her notebook again.

On the first page, written in large letters, were five words:

ONE DAY,I WILL DIRECT.

She ran her finger underneath the sentence.

"I'm going to prove it," she whispered.

She didn't know when.

She didn't know how.

But she knew she wasn't giving up.

Not yet.

Across town, sixteen year old Imani sat beside her bedroom window with a pen in our hand.

Her notebook was open.

The page was blank.

She had been staring at it for nearly twenty minutes.

Imani finally wrote one sentence.

Then she stopped.

She looked at the words and quietly crossed them out "it's terrible", she whispered.

She knew that wasn't true but whenever she will something she cared about, doubt followed closely behind.

What if nobody likes it?.

What if has stories never went anywhere?.

What if she's wasn't good enough?.

Are eyes drifted to waste the small photograph sitting on her desk. "Leila" her older sister the person who had always believe in her.

Imani swallowed hard.

Leila had been gone for years, but sometimes the memories still felt close enough to touch. She picked up her pen again this time, she didn't cross out the sentence she kept writing.
Because if there was one thing Leila had taught her, it was that a dream didn't have to disappear just because life became difficult.

Imani looked at the growing pages in front of her she didn't know it yet, but somewhere across town was another girl carrying the same impossible dream. They had never spoken, they didn't know each others names, they didn't know that one day they would become best friends. They didn't know that they would fight through some of the hardest moments of their lives together.

For now, they were simply two girls...

Two dreams...

And two completely different lives moving towards the same future.