Before the glitter. Before the vows by the sea. Before she ever whispered I love you into a hoodie's fabric and meant it with her whole trembling chest, there was a girl.
A small, sun-drenched thing with salt-stiff curls and sandalwood skin, born where afternoons smelled like sugarcane and mangoes, and the sky felt so close you could catch a piece of it if you jumped high enough.
Réunion Island.
The first place that ever called her by name.
She was Amaya.
Aya to those who really loved her.
Soft, loud, curious, a little wild in the edges. She spoke to dolls like they were co-stars in the movie of her life, narrating everything out loud
Fifth out of seven children.
The middle of the middle.
The kind of child who learned love through noise, through siblings yelling over the TV, cousins raiding the fridge, a mother's voice carrying warmth even through scolding.
Her father's hands always smelled faintly of oil and rain. Her mother's laughter could fix anything. Scraped knees, bad dreams, even the sting of being called a brat by the older ones.
Aya learned early that being loved in a big family meant being teased, shouted for, rescued, and held again all in the same hour.
The world was small but golden then. Mornings were mango-stained fingers and hair braided too tight. Afternoons, barefoot bike races through the street until the air itself felt like freedom.
And at sunset, she'd sit on the steps, listening to the ocean hum somewhere far behind the houses. The wind always carried something soft, cooking smoke, laughter, sandalwood, the faint pulse of music from a neighbor's window.
Her family's house was noisy, full, alive.
Her mother said it was good that way"Silence is for the lonely, mon bébé."
So Aya filled her life with sound.
When her little brother Sami was born, she thought the world had shifted around his tiny fists. She pressed her forehead to his and whispered promises she couldn't pronounce yet. For a while, everyone else got busy holding him, and Aya clung tighter to her mother's skirt, refusing to be forgotten.
She didn't know it yet, but she was already learning the language of tenderness. The kind that stays even after people leave.
The island raised her like a song, verse by verse, sun by sun.
It stitched courage into her bones, softness into her lungs.
She didn't yet know how far she'd have to travel, how much she'd have to break to find her way back to this beginning.
But one day, she would look back at this warmth…this barefoot girl with her whole heart glowing in her palms, and realize she had been her own first home all along.