You become the stage(s) you build: a philosophy and a metaphor encountered through the infinite potential of the smallest stage builders — the twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

Anthropomorphized, they introduce themselves like characters at an audition: each letter, both a candidate and a part of you. Intertwined, one holding the next, transforming into another, in dialogue with the one(s) before and after. You may find this conversation between letters is also a conversation between the many yous you have been — and the one you’ve not yet met.

Letters as contenders; words as worlds and routes to transformation within their structure.

The Stage(s) We Build is a habitat for thought, a stage for transformation — for understanding something too well, or not at all. An acknowledgment that not everything needs an answer, but every question you ask (yourself) matters. A non-linear storytelling via pattern and resonance — a path that leads you nowhere but into yourself.

There is no prescribed order of reading. A is(n’t) the beginning and Z is(n’t) the end. You are free to wander: to take it front to back, or in loops of your own making, following the branches of your own brain in real time until you arrive in a place you did not expect — where the parts of you that never speak to each other begin to murmur, and then to sing. To let the words lead you where your thoughts already want to go.

I illuminate some of the parallel strata of meaning through bolding, underlining, refragmentation, and cipher codes. Others will surface only when you touch them with your own light and brain branches.

This book is a different ecosystem with each pair of eyes. It changes with each beholder, widening on contact. You are in the book — and you are the book: a breathing collaboration between writer, reader, and the alphabet itself.