Three weeks has passed since my name was pulled from a barrel in Toronto while I was standing half a world away in China. Winning the Fringe lottery didn’t feel like a finish line. It felt like a starter pistol.
China became the backdrop, but the real work was internal. Between train stations, budget hotels, and beds that were never the same twice, I began polishing the play. Not writing from scratch –but excavating. Revisiting moments I had lived, places I had passed through, people who had held me together when I couldn’t do it myself.
Revision after revision followed me everywhere. On night trains. In cafés where I didn’t understand the menu. In rooms where the only familiar thing was my laptop. Each draft stripped something away excess explanation, fear, the need to be clever –and replaced it with something simpler and truer.
Eventually, there was a version I stopped fighting.
The final final draft.
For the first time, I could see how the bubbles belonged not as spectacle, –but as language. Fragile. Temporary. Playful. A visual echo of everything the story was already trying to say. The play no longer felt like something I was forcing into existence. It felt like something that had been waiting patiently for me to catch up.
Three weeks ago, I was still asking whether I deserved this moment.
Now, I’m asking how fully I can step into it.
The Fringe countdown has begun.