Reflections

The Silence I Chose

/ Sophie Nova / Leave a comment

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.

The Music Between Us

/ Sophie Nova / Leave a comment

Yesterday, my father told me he is dying.

He spoke about wills, final wishes, burial or cremation—the practical conversations that somehow feel impossible until they are suddenly necessary.

He is 76. Stage IV. Terminal. Less than a year, the doctors say.

Two years ago, I had cancer too. Stage II. I fought it. I survived it. Now I sit with the strange, specific weight of knowing exactly what that word costs from the inside, while watching my father carry a version of it I never had to face—the version where survival isn’t the expected outcome.

As he talked, I interrupted with my own story.

I told him about my mother. About how she left no will. No insurance. How everything fell to me. I thought I was explaining why those details mattered, but today I realize he wasn’t asking me to solve a problem. He was inviting me into one of the hardest conversations of his life.

That realization has been sitting heavily with me.

Not because I meant to be insensitive, but because I wish I had simply stayed with him.

This was the first time we had spoken since I called him in March 2024 to tell him my mother died. Over two years of silence, broken by two phone calls—one to tell him someone we both loved was gone, and one to tell me he is going too.

The strange thing is that today, it wasn’t his diagnosis that made me cry…

It was music.

I was building a playlist for my husband—something small, something mine to give him—and I caught myself pausing on opening tracks. A few notes in, and I already knew where a song was going. I started following the thread just to see where it led.

Stevie Wonder led to George Michael.

George Michael led to Janet Jackson.

Janet led to Michael Jackson.

Michael led to the Fender Rhodes.

The Rhodes led to the Hammond B3.

The Hammond led back to my childhood.

I could suddenly see my dad again—sitting at his keyboards, teaching me “96 Tears” and “House of the Rising Sun.” I can still hear the Leslie speaker swirling through the room. I can still hear Stevie Wonder playing somewhere in the house.

I realized something I had never put into words before:

The way I hear music isn’t accidental.

When I recognize a Rhodes within the first few notes…

When I notice that two songs share the same harmonic language…

When I care more about who played on a record than where it charted…

Those aren’t just my tastes.

They’re part of my father’s legacy.

He gave me that.

For years, I carried hurt. Some of it was justified. Some of it became habit. After my mother died, distance became easier than reconciliation. Time quietly passed while I assumed there would always be another chance to talk.

Most of us believe there’s always another tomorrow. For years I believed there would always be another tomorrow for this conversation. There wasn’t. Every year I spent guarding old wounds was a year I didn’t spend with my father.

Now, there may only be months.

That isn’t justice.

It’s just regret, arriving early and wearing a different name.

It’s amazing how quickly old arguments lose their weight when time becomes measurable.

The past hasn’t changed.

Neither has the hurt.

But something else has become more important.

I don’t want the last chapter of our story to be defined by the years we didn’t speak.

I want him to know that every time I hear Stevie Wonder, every time Eric Clapton comes on the radio, every time I recognize the sound of a Rhodes piano, I think of him.

Children inherit many things from their parents.

Sometimes it’s their eyes.

Sometimes it’s their smile.

Sometimes it’s a love of music so deeply rooted that decades later, a single chord can bring them home.

I don’t know how many conversations my father and I have left.

But I hope one of them is simply about music.

Because somewhere between Stevie Wonder and The Yardbirds, between a Rhodes piano and a Hammond B3, between Beatles and Stones, my father quietly gave me a part of myself.

Before he leaves this world, I want him to know that the way I hear music is one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me.

What the Body Knew First

/ Sophie Nova / Leave a comment

Every evening I came home was a calculation.

I had wanted a home of my own for years before I finally had one.

Not a shared home. Not a home that depended on someone else’s name or credit or willingness to stay. Mine. Bought with money I had earned, credit I had rebuilt from nothing, after years of working through the kind of damage that doesn’t announce itself all at once — a first marriage that ended in the loss of everything we had built together, a second that left my finances destroyed while I was too sick to stop it from happening.

I knew what it cost to lose a home. I knew what it took to earn one back.

So when I finally signed the papers — when the house was mine, legally and completely, rooms for my sons, a yard, the particular feeling of permanence I had been reaching toward for years — I believed it meant something. That we had arrived somewhere. That the rebuilding had worked.

What I did not expect was that I would learn to dread coming home to it.

It happened slowly. Not dramatically. Just the gradual accumulation of evenings when I sat in the parking lot at work a little longer than necessary. When I found one more task to finish before logging off. When I measured the drive home not by distance but by what might be waiting at the other end of it.

The body learns things before the mind names them. Mine had learned the temperature of the house before I opened the door. The particular quality of silence that meant something was brewing. The way a presence fills a room differently depending on what mood it carries. I had become fluent in a language I never chose to learn — reading the atmosphere of my own home the way you read weather, constantly, automatically, without deciding to.

I threw myself into work.

Not because I loved it more than my sons. Because work was the one place where I knew what I was walking into. Where the rules were legible. Where my effort produced outcomes I could predict. Where no one’s volatility was waiting behind ordinary questions.

My sons were teenagers. Navigating everything teenagers navigate — school, friends, the particular turbulence of becoming — and I was not there the way I wanted to be. Not because I had chosen work over them. Because I had chosen the office over coming home, and they happened to be at home.

That distinction matters and it also doesn’t. The result was the same.

I missed them. I missed my dog. I missed the ordinary life that should have been happening inside those walls — dinner at a reasonable hour, evenings without monitoring the atmosphere, the simple animal comfort of being in your own home without bracing.

I had rebuilt everything that could be rebuilt. Credit. Career. Stability. A house with my name on the deed.

And I was miserable inside it.

That is what the body knew before I had words for it. Not that I was in danger — not yet, not in the way that would eventually require a locked door and a phone call to the police. Just that something was wrong. That the place I had worked toward for years had become a place I calculated before entering. That home — the word, the idea, the thing I had wanted back for so long — no longer meant what it was supposed to mean.

The body keeps that accounting even when the mind is still negotiating.

It knew.

It was trying to tell me.

I just wasn’t ready to hear it yet.

What I Carried That Had No Name

/ Sophie Nova / Leave a comment

I carried it so long it started to feel like mine.

There is a particular kind of dread that has no dramatic shape to it.

It is not fear of something large. It is not the anticipation of crisis. It is quieter than that and more corrosive — the low-grade awareness that ordinary things have become unsafe. That a pen could become the reason the day unravels. That coming home requires a kind of preparation that has no name in the language of love.

I learned that dread in Wisconsin.

Not all at once. Slowly, the way you learn anything that is being taught without being named. The way a body adjusts to a temperature before the mind registers that it has been standing in cold water for a long time.

I remember a morning at work — September 2010. I had just mailed my mother’s birthday card. I told him I loved him. We talked about the store, about a traffic stand he was designing, about camping scripts. It was ordinary. It was the kind of conversation that could convince you things were fine.

And then a pen.

He needed a pen to write in his mother’s birthday card. There wasn’t one where he expected it. What followed was not a conversation about pens. It was something else entirely — accusations stacked on accusations, my failures catalogued, my intentions questioned, my love for him reframed as hatred, my working while he stayed home reframed as proof that I believed I was superior.

In under ten minutes, over a pen, I was told he would snap on my entire family. That he would go to jail. That I had ruined his day on purpose.

He saved the conversation. He emailed it to me.

The subject line read: u keep that so u can see what u did to my day on purpose u hateful jerk.

I sat at my desk and read it.

And then I kept working. Because there was nothing else to do. Because the rent was due. Because my sons needed dinner. Because the alternative was to go home, and going home meant walking into whatever state the morning had left behind.

That is the thing that has no name.

Not the explosion itself. Not the words, which were bad enough. But the calculation that happened afterward. The quiet arithmetic of deciding whether it was safe to return to the place where you lived. The way that question — what will I walk into — became as ordinary as checking the weather before you left in the morning.

I did not call it anything. I did not have language for it yet. I told myself it was stress. I told myself his father’s illness was making everything harder. I told myself the fire had warmth in it, and the warmth was real, and real things deserved patience.

What I could not yet say was that I had stopped living in my house and started managing it. That every evening I came home was a calculation. That I had organized my entire internal life around the question of his mood and learned to read the temperature of a room before I had taken my coat off.

That is not love.

That is labor without a name.

The labor no one sees because it leaves no physical record. No product. No timestamp. Just a woman at her desk, reading an email about a pen, deciding what to say and what not to say and how to walk through her own front door without setting something off.

I carried that for years.

I carried it so long it started to feel like mine.

After Fire

/ Sophie Nova / Leave a comment

Some warmth you accept not because it’s safe — but because the cold was worse.

When it returned, I didn’t ask what had happened.

I didn’t ask because I already knew the answer wouldn’t matter. What mattered was that it had returned. “That the silence was over. That I was no longer alone inside the absence of it.

That is the thing no one tells you about fire.

It isn’t always about the heat.

Sometimes it’s about what you were standing in before it arrived.

I had survived being abandoned once. I had learned the shape of that particular silence — the way it settles into the body, the way it confirms every quiet fear you’ve ever had about your own worth.

That lesson did not begin with him. It began earlier — quietly, thoroughly — in the way certain childhoods teach you to read your own worth through someone else’s disappointment.

By the time he left without explanation, without repair, without a single word — my nervous system didn’t reach for anger.

It reached for evidence.

And the evidence it found was familiar.

Something I did. Something I said. Something I was, or wasn’t, or couldn’t manage to become in time.

The leaving felt like confirmation.

So when it came back — the proposal, the reset, the return as if nothing had fractured — I said yes before I could think clearly about what I was saying yes to.

Not because I trusted it. Not because it felt right.

But because yes felt like a stay of execution on the verdict I had already begun to accept about myself.

This is what no one tells you about the moments after fire.

You’re not just afraid of being cold again. You’re afraid that the cold is what you deserve.

That warmth — even unstable, even conditional, even offered without accountability — feels like being chosen.

And being chosen felt like proof that the verdict was wrong.

It wasn’t proof. It was just heat.

But I didn’t know the difference yet.

And I was so tired of believing I was the reason people left.