Before there was Orion, before Tari, before the sticky notes and stolen moments of softness, there was silence.
And silence was a girl named Ayanna, aged sixteen, staring at the ceiling of her mother's one-room apartment with a question no one ever let her ask out loud:
*"What if I don't want to wake up tomorrow?"*
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Back then, the walls were cracked with old paint. Her mother worked two cleaning jobs and prayed over rice that never seemed enough. Ayanna, top of her class, was the golden child that never smiled.
People praised her for being focused.
She wasn't focused.
She was fading.
That year, her father disappeared. Again.
That year, she stopped eating lunch at school and told her friends she was "fasting."
That year, a teacher caught her crying in the toilet and said:
*"You're too smart to be sad."*
As if depression took roll call before showing up.
As if brains were bulletproof.
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*Flashback – One night, age 16*
Ayanna sat with her journal open.
No words came.
So she drew a single black line across the page.
Then another.
Then another.
Until the paper was just… dark.
It was her way of screaming without a sound.
She never showed anyone that page.
Until now.
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*Back to present*
She opens the old journal at 2:03 a.m. in her Orion dorm.
Stares at the page she once blacked out.
Then slowly, softly, she writes under the lines:
**"I made it.
I'm still here.
And maybe that's the most radical thing I've ever done."**
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