PREFACE.

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PREFACE.

ACT ZERO; SCENE ONE

SHE RUNS.

TCHAIKOVSKY - 1812 OVERTURE
[OP. 49; IN E FLAT MAJOR.]

LEANING HER head against the wall, head craned upward towards the artificial fluorescent lighting, the sound of silence urged her to speak something to fill the void, but the silence was all too loud already.

Amaya didn't feel real, almost like an illusion. She felt submerged between the space of a lingering C to F#, suspended between deep and shrill.

Although there was the hard wall digging at all the wrong notes at the back of her skull, the all too cold tiles of the window sill piercing into her skin like guitar strings to the untrained fingertips, it felt as if she was simply watching her life from another body. The audience to her own orchestra.

In fact, she thought all of this was all a dream until her mother's footsteps, usually booming and authoritative, reduced to a quiet pitter patter, resembling the diminuendo of an ending chorus. Her mother delicately opened the door, as if making the slightest of noises would shatter earth and let it fall to hell. 

She held her breath, lungs contracting in sounds of a startling trombone. Loud and obnoxious, too much for the world but not loud enough for herself.

Her mother cradled a flowering bruise on her cheekbone, heavily contrasting from her golden skin.

"Leave." 

The words fell off her mother's lips and plummeted into the void between her shallow breaths.

The symphonies of car honking, screeching tires, and crying skies halted. For a moment, time stilled, frozen in the moment of realization.

Then, it was chaos.

Hustling about as quietly as possible, Amaya ran without muttering a simple goodbye to her mother. She ran onto the bustling, cold roads of Amsterdam without an umbrella to protect her from the clouds unleashing the weight within itself onto the world.

Not that it would do any good.

She was with nothing but a bag, a stilled mind, and a twittering heart. One cloud hovered over the walnut brown-eyed lady's brain;

This is just the start.

And so, it poured.

Hopping from taxi to taxi after her all too far away friends didn't pick up any of her phone calls, Amaya realized a dreading factor: She was but a melody in a world full of tunes.

Though this revelation rained on her now-saddened but freed mind, Amaya decided to make it her mission to find someone new to get away with; or find someone to show her around her home city until her friends got back.  The limited amount of friends she had were in America without her, since her mother was all too paranoid about sending her precious little daughter into the real world.

At first, it was no luck.

All the drivers demanded a destination she didn't know of. How was she supposed to know where the word "away" was found? All the people she came across seemed too caught up in their own lives to realize they aren't living. There were no sweet tunes.

Soaked as she fiddled with the drenched straps of her bag, she wandered in search of her next "audition" for the role of her partner in crime. The rain that hadn't stopped pouring from the morning she left slowed her down to heavy steps and drowned hopes.

Then, she stumbled upon an occupied taxi. Swamped and sleepy, she tapped on the window.

With ink-dark hair spilling over face, thin tendrils pressed against her plump, red-hued lips and swayed over her face by the pummeling wind, her cinnamon eyes were wild and frenzied, in search of the human equivalent of impossible.

The taxi driver startled awake, and as soon as her eyes met his, she swore she heard an enchanting tune radiate from his startled orbs. The sweetest tenor of summertime that left a peachy sweet aftertaste engraved into a sunken, tired, large eyes of a mere boy.

The hum of a harp, she thought, goes great with the bold strings of a violin.

A harmonization.

At that moment, she declared him her partner in crime, because she had already understood him.

She took note of the several empty cups of what had seemed to be black tea, the bags under his eyes, his sunken features, the broad outlines of his neck that slouched into his shoulders soft and smoothly, like high notes on a piano. From all of her quick observations she had concluded one major thing:

She had found a potential Beyoncé in a world full of Michelle's.

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