Chapter 1 - The Microphone

I stood in the crowd, watching from below as our vision took the stage without us.

A twitch pulled at my right eye.

On the outside, I smiled. 

On the inside, I was seething.

The room was packed, rows of chairs filled with reporters, city officials, and sponsors. Cameras angled toward the podium. Microphones stood waiting, their cords coiled at the base, red lights blinking.

Light City was being announced to the world, an ambitious citywide festival of light, the first of its kind in the country. It launched a year later. In that first year alone, it drew 400,000 visitors and brought $33.8 million into the city.

It was our idea.

And we were not at the microphone.

I watched from the sidelines while others spoke. I appeared in the opening video, and that was it. Justin wasn’t in it at all.

We had imagined this long before it had a name. We had carried it through years of uncertainty, long nights, impossible logistics, and people who thought we were out of our minds. We had risked our time, our livelihood, and our reputations because we believed in what it could become.

To everyone else, it was a project. To us, it was everything we had.

Speaker after speaker stepped forward, and the language was smooth and rehearsed. Light. Music. Innovation. Impact. The same words, over and over. We were still building it. They had simply stopped saying our names.

That was when it hit.

This was no longer ours.

I kept my shoulders loose and my face neutral, nodded at the right moments, even laughed when the person beside me leaned in to whisper how exciting it all was.

This was deeper than disappointment. It was rage with nowhere to go, the kind that burns hotter for having to sit still.

We were close enough to the stage to feel the lights and completely absent from anything being said. Justin, who had given as much of himself to this as I had, stood beside me, his face unreadable.

His hand found mine and squeezed once. We didn’t need to say anything. We both knew.

This was the beginning of the end.

After the applause died down, people filtered toward the reception. Someone I barely knew grabbed my arm, smiling.

“Congratulations! This is going to be incredible.”

I forced my face into something close to gratitude.

“Thank you,” I said. “It really is.”

The lie tasted metallic.

One of our agency employees caught my eye from across the room. She looked at me like she wanted to say something. I gave her a small smile and looked away.

Until then, I had been telling myself this was temporary. That we were still inside the circle. That our place would not be diminished.

But standing there, smiling through it while our role was erased, I couldn’t deny it anymore.

We were disappearing from the story.

☉

That night, after everyone was asleep, I climbed into bed, pulled the covers over my head, and cried. I kept it muffled so my kids wouldn’t hear, so my mom wouldn’t ask. My jaw ached from everything I could not say. I cried until my eyes swelled and there was nothing left.

And then I lay there in the dark, asking myself the question I had been avoiding for months: What am I still doing here?

I didn’t have an answer.

Because too many people were counting on me.

Because I didn’t know who I was without it.

Because stopping felt like dying.

So I did what I always did when I didn’t know what else to do. I got up and kept going. I tried harder.

This wasn’t the first time I had lost something.

It was the first time I could feel it slipping while I was still holding it.