They say stories begin with a spark—a first breath, a first word, a first lie. But hers began with silence.
Before the theater, before the ticket, before her name left anyone's mouth, there was only stillness. A mother who left before sunrise. A father who never asked if she cried. The world greeted her not with lullabies but with absence, she was met with the kind of love that never learned the way home.
No spotlight waited for her entrance. No script marked her steps. She grew in the shadows, shaped by the emptiness people left behind. And still, something in her endured. Maybe it was foolishness. Maybe it was hope. Maybe they were the same thing.
And when the bus door opened that rainy night, when fate slipped a paper into her palm with no return address—she didn't know it yet, but she was walking into a story that would try to swallow her whole.
A stage doesn't care who you are before you step on it.
Only if you become.