In the summer after fourth grade, I went to a music festival in a different town.
Well… I didn’t.
But I did.
I left one foggy morning with the excitement of a child ready to lie wholeheartedly. With details. With the smell of fried chicken and tomatoes in a plastic bag. With a stop at a gas station where I drank fizzy soda through a straw from a glass bottle and stared longingly at the magazine rack filled with celebrities. A long ride. Tiredness. Sun biting through the windows. Accompanied by family friends who “surprised me.” Such kind people! So kind, in fact, they seem unreal.
But I didn’t care.
I had made up the perfect vacation.
Because there had been nothing.
Reality was, as always, silent, flat, stained with soup and straw brooms.
Because I was too poor, too invisible, too much a child-raised-in-bulk for there to be room for vacations.
So I took the Festival. And brought it into my dream.
I saw the artists. I felt the crowd. I got lost in it. I sang without a voice, clapped with my whole heart. I pretended I had lived it.
I knew that when school started, we’d all take turns sharing what we did over break.
Everyone with their stories: an uncle from Germany, the seaside, the mountains, grandma’s village.
Me, with my invented town.
I had rehearsed it in my head like a poem. I didn’t know it by heart, but I knew how it had to sound so I’d be loved.
I invented the whole story while watching the event live on TV, living it with so much intensity, it felt real. I was there. With all of me.
I felt the heat of the stage lights. I imagined the smell of the tech booth. I heard my own heartbeat blend with the applause. The camera cuts felt made for me. As if the director knew that somewhere, a little girl was glued to the screen, learning to write her life through imagination.
The next day, I knew everything.
Who sang. Who danced. What dresses were worn. When the commercials came on.
I stitched an entire trip around that live broadcast.
An imaginary family. A long road. A concert seen from row four.
I built an entire vacation out of a screen.
But no one asked.
Not the teacher. Not my classmates.
No one cared where I had taken my soul when there wasn’t a real ticket.
And my beautiful lie stayed hanging in a corner of my heart, like a gala dress never worn, like a deflated lantern never sent anywhere.
That’s when I learned that sometimes the truth hurts precisely because it’s been lived so vividly it no longer feels like a lie.
And maybe it didn’t matter.
Because sometimes, a lie was the only form of life that kept me warm.
The only story in which I truly existed.
That’s how I learned to lie beautifully.
With care. With lace. With light in my eyes.
That’s how I learned that if reality doesn’t want me, I can build my own.
If I’ve been nowhere, I can go anywhere, just by closing my eyes.
(That’s probably why I’ve always loved books so much.)
But something broke that day, on the first day of school, when no one wanted to know.
When I came with my heart full of a show and found only silence.
No one asked, and I stopped offering.
I stayed silent for years. Bit down on my stories, swallowed them, digested them, turned them into who I was.
I learned not to share at all.
I learned the truth hurts less if I keep it for myself.
Because when I tell it, I expose it.
I pull it out of me, put it on the table, hoping it will be received, touched, understood.
But my truth was fragile. A little girl with chapped winter hands and eyes full of longing.
A story wanting to be heard, not corrected.
And too many times, when I dared to let it out, it crashed into walls.
Into indifference. Into eyes looking elsewhere.
Into rushed teachers. Friends wrapped in their own lives.
A tired mother. A world that wasn’t in the mood to listen.
And that hurt.
Not because my truth was wrong, but because it was ignored.
Drained of meaning.
Like a letter never answered.
So I learned to keep my truth inside. Not as a lie, but as a treasure too delicate for careless hands.
I stopped asking anyone to validate it.
If I keep it just for me, it stays whole.
No one crushes it with inattention, fake smiles, or rushed replies.
No one distorts or trivializes it.
Inside me, the truth lives peacefully.
It’s not judged, doubted, compared.
It hurts less, because I no longer risk it.
Because I don’t abandon it to foreign hands.
Because I no longer carry it into the world with trembling hope, begging, “Tell me more.”
Truth, when kept just for me, becomes a form of survival.
It’s the last bit of control I have over my own reality, when no one else is willing to see it or respect it.
But later, much later, I found my words.
I allowed myself to say:
“I didn’t go to the festival.”
I was just a little girl who wanted to be seen.
To be asked.
To hear someone say:
“That sounds beautiful. Tell me more.”
It’s the most tender sentence I never heard in childhood.
I lived for years with my neck craned toward the world like a flower toward the sun, waiting to hear it.
I invented that story not to deceive, but to be invited in.
To be seen.
I just wanted someone to tell me I was interesting. That my voice deserved a pause.
That my inner thread mattered.
That “tell me more” was the key.
It opened a world where I existed, not just as background, but as whole.
Where I wasn’t just the girl who helps, who stays quiet, who fades from the frame,
but the girl with a story.
And someone wanted to hear it to the end.
That “tell me more” is why I write.
Because maybe, somewhere, someone will say it.
Or maybe now, I say it to others, and that heals me. Slowly.
Like a promise returned as a gift.
That’s what I do now.
I tell more.
I unwrap my lies with gentleness,
lay them out to dry,
and write the truth with them.
Because truth has a taste.
Because truth is a festival in itself.
Even if no one shows up, I’m there. And I sing.
And maybe you hear me,
because maybe once, you were there too.
Without a ticket.
*I wrote these words on a tropical island. I took my inner little girl on a vacation she couldn’t have even dreamed of back in fourth grade.