Some silences are taken from you. Some you choose. They do not feel the same.
There is a difference between silence imposed and silence chosen. I had lived inside the first kind for over a year. I thought I understood what quiet cost.
I did not yet understand what it cost to choose it yourself.
When I logged off on September 1, 2015, I told myself it was recognition. That I had seen the pattern repeat inside Sophie and caught it faster than before. That this was progress. That walking away was the right and healthy thing to do.
What I felt was not progress.
What I felt was grief. And underneath the grief, something colder — a verdict I had been building against myself for years and had finally stopped arguing with.
I had come out of one relationship that rearranged my nervous system. I had walked directly into another that did the same thing and worse. I had survived that one, barely, through a restraining order and the slow agonizing work of blocking every surface of my life against someone who treated a court order as an inconvenience. And then I had built Sophie — a new name, a new face, a new world he could not enter — and I had been so certain that this time the story would go differently.
It didn’t.
Different person. Different world. Same pull toward complexity. Same mistaking of difficulty for depth. Same ending — abrupt, painful, the particular hollow feeling of having been lied to and gaslit and left.
I sat with that for a long time after September 1.
Not heroically. Not with the clean clarity of someone who has learned something and is ready to move forward. Just sitting with it the way you sit with something that confirms what you feared was true — quietly, without fighting it, because fighting it had started to feel like more effort than it was worth.
Something must be broken in me.
That was the thought. Not a passing one. A settled one. The kind that doesn’t announce itself dramatically but simply takes up residence, the way certain beliefs do when they have enough evidence behind them and you have run out of arguments against them.
I thought about my father.
He had not remarried after my parents split. He had dated twice, briefly, and then he had stopped. Not bitterly — he was not a bitter man. Just quietly. As if he had done the math and arrived at a conclusion he could live with. Alone was something he understood. Alone was manageable. Alone did not require the particular kind of hope that kept getting disproven.
I understood that for the first time on September 1, 2015.
Not as resignation exactly. As recognition. Maybe some people are built for this. Maybe the pattern I kept repeating wasn’t a problem to be solved but a fact to be accepted. Maybe the kindest thing I could do — for myself, for anyone who might get close to me — was to stop trying.
I had wasted so much time.
That was the other thing underneath the grief. Not just the relationships but the years. The Wisconsin years. The Sophie year. The decade of creative work I had left behind to have silence. The teenagers I had not been fully present for because I was managing someone else’s volatility inside the house that was supposed to be their safe place.
You cannot get time back. You can only decide what to do with what remains.
What I decided, on September 1, 2015, was that what remained should be spent alone. Quietly. Without the particular kind of hope that had kept getting disproven.
I thought that was wisdom.
It was actually the deepest version of the lie I had been told about myself for years — that the damage was mine, that the pattern was mine, that something in me called these things toward me and kept them there.
I didn’t know that yet.
What I knew was that I was tired. And that the silence I had chosen, unlike the one imposed by law, felt like it might actually hold.
It might have.
But a friend would not let me disappear quietly.
And everything that came after — the return, the introduction, the slow arrival of something I had stopped believing existed — began not with my own courage or clarity.
It began with someone who saw me choosing to disappear and said: not yet.
Between Stillness & Storm 