There was a group we lived inside of, even if it didn’t have a formal name: neighbors who swapped sugar and small favors, the baker who slipped us warm rolls, the grocer who kept a ledger with names and generous smudges. We called ourselves, jokingly, ep Célavie — an odd little mash of syllables that felt like a private radio frequency. It meant nothing specific, and that was its charm. We were a constellation of small things: an overflowing mailbox, a shared umbrella at market, a chorus of mismatched voices at neighborhood meals. Within that group, belonging wasn’t signed or declared. It was shown — through someone bringing soup on a rainy night, a bike carried up three flights of stairs for a neighbor, a chorus of greetings when a child returned home late.

School was both refuge and stage. I loved the geometry of chalk dust and the way numbers rearranged themselves like paper planes when you tilted them right. I wasn’t the loudest kid — I preferred corners where conversations happened in half-words and nods — but I loved stories. Teachers who recited poems as if they were secrets convinced me that language is a tool for opening doors that didn’t look like doors. I learned to listen for quiet revolutions: a sentence that changed everything for a classmate, a joke that stitched together a lonely afternoon.

My early life was also a lesson in beginnings that never stayed the same. My mother would say, “We are always becoming,” as she stitched a hem or rearranged flowers on the sill. Movement was in the family’s bones: cousins arriving and leaving, jobs opening and closing like book covers, the slow migration of recipes as people moved between kitchens. Those comings and goings taught me to keep my hands open for new stories, and to treat farewells like chapters rather than final sentences.

Music threaded through everything. There wasn’t one playlist in our lives; instead, there were overlapping soundtracks: a neighbor’s jazz records, a radio soap opera, children racing scooters and creating percussion out of the city’s clatter. I remember dancing barefoot in the kitchen to a record that skipped in the same spot every time, and how that tiny flaw made the song ours. The ep Célavie group had its own songs, phrases and ways of laughing that announced you immediately as part of the neighborhood.