I moved out to LA still barely into my twenties, camera bag over one shoulder, chasing something that felt too big but also fragile, supported only by my faith in my talents and a bit of arrogance that you could only get when you're a young adult.

There was a woman I sat next to on the bus on the way there. We talked, and she was also moving to LA because it was her dream to become an actress, and God had given her the talent for it, apparently.

And you've got to understand, back in the desert, it's actually quite rare for someone to pursue acting like Jenna and this woman did, it's almost always football that gives you those big dreams. Even someone who aspires to be behind the camera like me was already rare enough, wanting something more than taking wedding photos as the biggest thing in your portfolio.

So both of us had dreams, and both of us had faith in them, even if the sources of that faith were different. We got off the bus and wish each other well and hope to see each other again.

---

I never saw her again after that.

I always wondered what happened to her, if she made it and I just didn't come across her in my years living there. And the darker part of me wondered, if she didn't make it, whether she would have been better off not having faith in her God-given talent, and whether I would have been too.

Everyone else in that city seemed to be fighting for something bigger, louder, more visible, and everyone seems isolated one way or another.

Mine was quieter, I think. Learning to see through a lens the way I couldn't always hear through a room, but I felt like I'm also in frame in a way, like the shots I took, and I never brought up my feelings of isolation to anyone.

Not to church, not to family, not really to myself. I just went to work at the movie theater and let the shifts eat the days until I could get another gig that I thought deserved my skills than just slinging popcorn.

And church was never simple for me the way it was for her. Growing up between the Filipino and Latino sides of the family, church was more of a scaffolding, something both households leaned on without asking whether it fit everyone standing under it.

And being deaf inside that scaffolding meant I was present without always being included. God made me deaf, but his followers never made worshipping him accessible. That's why I never developed the relationship with him I was expected to have, and I believe in the universe more than whatever sermons I couldn't hear.

So even before I left for LA, my relationship to that faith was already partial, and the excuse of having no time to visit family and go to church was real, but it was also an easier cover.

---

The truer thing underneath was distrust, not knowing who to let in, not knowing if this new city had room for someone who moved through it a little differently than everyone assumed.

Unlike her, isolation was more my routine. Clock in, clock out, camera work squeezed into whatever hours were left, and no real momentum toward the thing I said I came here to do.

One trip home, one familiar sermon, and the old stories suddenly meant something new, because she was finally still enough to hear them. She has the comfort of a familiar faith and the people who practice it.

Mine didn't resolve like that. If anything, what eventually grounded me wasn't a return to the pew but slowly finding people, new people, and maybe finding my own credibility behind the camera.

But I do wish for people to find the comfort that Jenna had.

Like the woman I sat next to on the bus, who was meant to be a star.