Though her first cry rang out in a quiet hospital in the northern part of the country, her story had threads reaching far towards the south.
Her father's job had brought him to the headquarters of a large coal company, far from the coconut-lined coasts of the family's native home. The apartment in the staff quarters was practical and spare, its windows opening onto rows of identical buildings and the faint buzz of office life. It was here, far from the language and rhythms of their ancestral town, that their long-awaited daughter finally arrived.
Her mother, a full-time homemaker, filled the rooms with quiet routine filtered sunlight on clean floors, the smell of boiling milk in the mornings, soft lullabies in the afternoons. Her father, steady and methodical, carried the weight of office work while quietly dreaming of the day he might return to the south.
From her first days, she belonged to two worlds: the bustling company township where her childhood began, and the distant, rain-green state her parents always called "home."