I didn't know I was leaving my old life. Not at first. It felt like any other morning-too loud outside, too crowded inside-until something small slipped through the cracks of my attention. A pause. A breath I didn't remember taking. A moment that didn't ask to be broadcast.

It wasn't an event. It wasn't a revelation. Just a shift so gentle it should've gone unnoticed: the world exhaled, and for the first time I heard it.

There, between one heartbeat and the next, something quiet touched my shoulder. Not a voice. Not a warning. Just presence-soft as early light, sharp as recognition.

I stood perfectly still. And in that stillness, something inside me finally moved.

Maybe that's how all true beginnings arrive. Not as thunder. As a subtle permission: you don't have to keep pretending you can't hear yourself.

I didn't know it yet, but that was the moment everything started to unfurl- the moment the noise cracked, the moment the real world slipped through, the moment I realized silence wasn't emptiness.

It was direction.

And it had been waiting for me all along.