Julia grew up an impressionable girl. “A hopeless romantic,” her mother sighed with disappointment. Being an accountant, she was well protected by her practical nature from all the suffering that usually comes with love. She wasn’t unfamiliar with men, but all she really needed from them was a paycheck and the ability to fix the toilet if it started leaking.
Julia was different. She grew up on fairy tales about a prince on a white horse who always arrived just in time to rescue the princess from yet another monster. She stayed obsessed with them for years. But then she discovered a book about the scarlet sails, and it completely enchanted her.
It was a story about a little girl named Assol, who lived in a small village by the sea. Her father made toys to sell, and one day he gave her a little ship with scarlet sails. While playing, she set it afloat in a stream and ran after it. The ship soon disappeared from sight, and she had already said goodbye to it forever when she suddenly saw an old man holding her toy. Smiling, he told her that one day, when the time came, a real ship with scarlet sails would sail to her, and a prince would step off it to take her away with him.
She believed him, and whenever people started making fun of her, she would shout back that soon she would sail away from them on a beautiful ship with scarlet sails, with a prince who would come for her. Naturally, that didn’t help. Quite the opposite, it only gave them more reasons to laugh, and before long she was officially known as the village weirdo.
One day, a ship anchored near the village. Its captain was a young man named Grey. He came from a very wealthy family but had run away from home as a boy to become a sailor. By chance, he saw Assol and fell in love with her. The villagers, however, were quick to explain that the girl wasn’t quite right in the head — she was waiting for some prince who would come for her on a ship with scarlet sails and take her away from this place.
Julia especially loved the ending of the story. Grey had ordered scarlet sails for his ship, and one day he sailed under them to the shore where Assol’s house stood. Her dream had come true, and she finally met her prince.
That’s when Julia realized she needed scarlet sails. A prince on a white horse would have done, but scarlet sails… well, that was another level. From then on, she came to the lake every day, staring off into the distance. She was waiting for her Grey. Sometimes, when her patience ran out and her emotions boiled over, she would mentally call him an asshole—or worse—wondering where he was and why he wasn’t rushing to take her away from this boring, hectic, soulless metropolis and finally carry her off to a beautiful southern city, where the sun always shone, the houses impressed with their beauty, the flowers bloomed, and the people were always happy. But the horizon remained empty.
Time passed. She grew up. She no longer counted on a ship with scarlet sails, or on a prince on a white horse. Her dreams had slowly shrunk to something more modest: a nice young man with a bouquet of flowers, arriving in a white limousine, climbing up her fire escape, and whisking her away. But even that somehow never seemed to work out for her, even though in the movies, apparently, even prostitutes managed it without any trouble.
She blamed the city — that pragmatic, hectic, soulless pit that drained every drop of true love from people and replaced it with greed and lust. So she decided to leave. She chose Italy, reasoning that if she was going to find the man of her dreams, who else could possibly compete with Italians?
The Italians were relaxed, persistent in showing their attention, and never failed to call her by the luxurious word Bella. But that didn’t mean any of them came close to what she was looking for. The real test was sex. As soon as they made it to bed, every last admirer promptly lost interest and moved on to the next object of their adoration. It was a real bummer.
“Stronzo!” Julia shouted after them, thinking that the Finns or Swedes definitely wouldn’t have behaved like this. But she didn’t want to move to Scandinavia. Her intuition suggested that princes were probably in short supply there, unlike the lumberjacks. But a lumberjack was the last thing she needed, so she returned home.
Julia didn’t stay sad for long. Before she knew it, she was reading stories about people who had been abducted by aliens. Apparently, life somehow got a lot better afterward. One story, in particular, stuck with her: a happy couple who were both kidnapped, met aboard a flying saucer, and then, upon being returned to Earth, immediately won the lottery and moved to a tropical island. Now they live in blissful love, happily praising the aliens for their excellent taste in matchmaking.
That’s when Julia realized what she really needed. A ship with scarlet sails, a white limousine, even a prince on a white horse, it was all a complete waste of time. Her whole life she had been dreaming of the wrong things and looking in all the wrong places. Aliens, that was the right solution.
Her plan was simple. She needed to be kidnapped by aliens, and once aboard she would figure out who was a prince and who was not. After thinking it over, she decided a prince might not even be necessary. It would be enough if the green bastards just took her off this planet, where she had no chance of finding happiness.
She got so caught up in the idea that she started visiting places where UFOs were often spotted. Sitting on rocks under the starry sky, shining a flashlight at the heavens, she hoped someone in a flying saucer would notice her. She even made a small circle of friends who were also eager to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. But for some reason, the aliens had no interest in reaching out.
A lot of time passed. At some point, Julia realized that she didn’t matter to any prince and finally made her peace with it. She got a dog, walked him along the lake, and explored new trails with him in the forest. In the evenings, she would sit on the deck in her backyard, watching the starry sky and mentally giving the middle finger to the aliens who had treated her with such vulgar indifference. Life was good.
And then, one evening, an old goofball she used to go alien-hunting with called her. Without any small talk about how she was or how her health was, he launched straight into an excited story about a strange object from deep space called 3I/ATLAS that had entered our solar system. “Believe me,” he told her, “it’s an alien ship, and it’s about to approach Earth. Some enlightened people have already made contact with the beings on board, and they’ve agreed to come down and take anyone who wants to go with them. So, what about you? Are you in or not?”
Julia suddenly realized that these were her scarlet sails. Her dream was coming to her from the depths of space. She even started packing, thinking through everything she would need for her final quest for a prince. But then she looked at her dog.
She didn’t know if she could take him with her. Would the dog be happy wherever they were going? Was there snow, the way she loved to roll in it? How would the other passengers feel about a dog, and would she get along with the aliens? There were plenty of other questions too, but there was no one to ask.
That evening, sitting on the deck with a glass of wine and her retriever at her feet, she stared up at the sky, where the object labeled 3I/ATLAS steadily approached Earth. In that moment, she realized she didn’t want to go anywhere, and she didn’t need any prince anymore. She was perfectly content right where she was, on the deck with her dog, a glass of wine in hand, and the quiet broken only by the distant hum of the city.
She also thought that she didn’t have much time left, and wasting it on something as meaningless as a quest for a prince made no sense. There is a time for everything, and that time was over for her. Besides, she had a dog, and what prince could possibly compete with that?
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