SoftNoise

thought this year would be different.

every birthday for as long as i can remember, the days leading up to it go a little grey. people don't really talk about that part, the way a birthday can feel less like a celebration and more like a checkpoint you didn't ask to reach. a quiet tallying of where you are versus where you thought you'd be. i call it the blues because that's the gentlest word for it. it comes every year, soft and uninvited, and every year i tell myself the next one will feel lighter.

this year i actually believed it. i had reasons to. i'd opened myself up to someone. i'd let a little softness back into my life after keeping it locked away for so long. i thought, maybe twenty-five is the one i don't spend bracing against.

and then this had to happen. right up against the day. of course it did.

so here i am, days from twenty-five, and the blues found me anyway, except this year they brought company. this year they brought missing him.

i miss him. i'm not going to pretend i don't, even knowing everything i know, even after all the going still and waiting. the heart doesn't take instruction very well. it doesn't care that he went quiet, that the math didn't add up, that i'd already made my peace about not chasing. it just misses. plainly, stubbornly, at the worst possible time.

there's a song i keep coming back to. one of those sad, slow ones that says the thing you can't quite say yourself. it's about that specific ache of feeling like someone understood you in a way nobody else has, and not knowing how to let that go even when you know you should. the worst part of a song like that isn't the longing. it's the little voice underneath it, the one wondering if you're partly to blame, the one quietly trying to convince itself that nobody else will ever get you the same way. i play it and i let it be true for the length of the song. then it ends, and i have to decide whether to believe it.

i don't think i believe it. not fully. but some nights, close to a birthday, with the blues already in the room, it's hard to argue with.

here's what i'm trying to hold onto, even now, even sad.

the version of me that opened the door wasn't foolish. she was brave. it's easy, in a week like this, to look back and think i shouldn't have let anyone in, that the softness was a mistake, that i handed something over and got quiet in return. but i don't actually believe that either. wanting to be loved isn't the error. opening up isn't the error. the bravery was real even though the outcome stings.

and turning twenty-five is not a verdict on anything. it isn't a deadline i missed or a test i failed. it's just a day. a day where i'll be exactly as much myself as i was the day before, with one more year of having survived things i didn't think i'd survive, of building things from nothing, of loving out loud even when it wasn't returned in equal measure. that's not a small life. that's a full one.

so i'll let myself miss him this week. i'm not going to fight it or pretend i'm above it. i'll play the sad song and i'll feel the blues and i'll let twenty-five arrive heavier than i wanted it to.

but i'm also going to keep my own peace. i'm going to be soft with the girl who hoped this year would be different, because she wasn't wrong to hope. and somewhere underneath the missing and the grey, i'm going to keep quietly believing the thing the song is too sad to admit:

that somebody will get me. that being understood isn't a door that only opens once. that the right person doesn't go quiet on you days before your birthday, doesn't leave you reading silence for clues about your own worth.

twenty-five doesn't have to be the year it all came together. it can just be the year i kept choosing myself, even sad, even missing him, even with the blues sitting right there beside me.

i'll take that. it's enough.

he sent me six minutes once.

six whole minutes of his voice, soft and careful, telling me i mattered. that i wasn't just a friend. that he felt like a child who'd disappointed his parents, almost too ashamed to speak. he said i want to do better. he said don't be angry, my love. he said my name like it was something he was holding gently in both hands.

and then he was gone.

it's strange, the kind of quiet that comes after someone tells you that you matter. it's louder than ordinary silence. it has a shape to it. you keep waiting for it to break, the way you wait for a held breath to finally let go.

thursday he poured all of that out. and then thursday became friday became the weekend became a monday where i called him just to hear the line ring and ring and ring into nothing.

i wasn't asking for much. i never was. that's the part that sits oddly in my chest. i know what it is to be busy. i've watched him be busy, sat right beside him while the deadlines piled up and the fires kept lighting. i'm not a stranger to overwhelm. i run a business. i know what it is to be a person stretched past the edges of your own day.

but i also know this: no matter how heavy a day gets, a single line is possible. thinking of you. i'm drowning but you're on my mind. talk tonight. ten seconds. that's all the difference between feeling chosen and feeling like an afterthought someone keeps meaning to get to.

he found six minutes to apologize. he couldn't find ten seconds to stay.

here's the thing i'm learning, slowly, the way you learn things you'd rather not.

words are easy to love. they arrive warm and complete, already shaped into exactly what you wanted to hear. you mean a lot to me. you're not just a friend. i'll do better. you can hold a sentence like that against your chest for days.

but a sentence isn't a person showing up. a sentence is a promise, and a promise is only as real as the morning after it. the apology was beautiful. the apology was also, it turns out, the entire thing. there was no tuesday version of it. no small, unremarkable proof. just the grand gesture and then the disappearing, like he'd spent everything he had on the saying and had nothing left for the doing.

i opened the door for him. that's what i keep coming back to. i'd kept it shut for a long time, since 2023, since the last time someone got to know my softness. and i opened it. my friends knew his name. my family knew his name. he came to my house. he saw me when i was struggling and alone and he showed up, and i thought, oh. maybe this. maybe i can let this in.

so this isn't about a man not texting back. it's about what it costs to finally let yourself want something, and then to watch it go quiet on you.

i've decided not to chase the quiet.

i've done my part. i named what hurt, gently, without cruelty, without making him wrong for being human. i forgave. i understood. i called. i have, if anything, been too generous with my grace, handing it out before it was even asked for. there's nothing left for me to do that wouldn't just be me holding up something that's supposed to stand on its own.

so i'm putting it down. not slamming it, not setting it on fire. just setting it down, and stepping back, and letting him show me who he is when i stop making it easy. because that's the truest thing a person ever tells you: not what they say when they're full of guilt, but what they do when you go still and wait.

if he comes back soft and stays soft, if the doing finally matches the saying, i'll know. and if the silence just keeps stretching, or if there's another lovely voice note followed by the same vanishing, i'll know that too. either way, it's his to show me now. not mine to coax out of him.

i don't know yet if i was in love with him. i think that's almost beside the point. what i know is that being with him kept leaving me unsure, always a little bit waiting, always wondering where i fit, always reading the silence for clues. and a good thing, an early thing, shouldn't make you feel like you're constantly auditioning for a part you've already been promised.

i deserve the version of someone that takes ten seconds. the unglamorous, unremarkable, daily ten seconds. not the six-minute performance of devotion, but the quiet, ordinary proof of it.

so i'm holding my own peace for now. i'm being gentle with the part of me that was brave enough to open the door in the first place. she didn't do anything wrong. she just loved out loud, the way i've always wanted to be loved back.

okay so let's talk about being the firstborn girl for a second.

because nobody really talks about how heavy that is. you don't just get to be a kid, you get to be an example. responsible, composed, perfect. and if you're not? disappointing.

i was never the straight A student. my younger ones were. my brother was. and for the longest time i carried that like something was fundamentally wrong with me.

then i got to university, did a course i didn't even want, struggled through it, took an extra year. and somewhere in all of that confusion i realized, i just want to cook. like actually cook. build something in a kitchen. make that my life.

you can imagine how that went down.

"what do you mean you want to be a chef?" said everyone, everywhere, all at once.

but i went anyway. culinary school, the whole thing. it hasn't always been easy and my business has its rough days but it's mine and i built it and that matters.

somewhere around now, almost twenty five, i just got tired of shrinking.

tired of avoiding bold colors. tired of friends who subtly made me feel like too much. tired of looking at my own body and finding problems.

so i started doing small things just for me. nails. lashes. burgundy lips. red everything. monthly pedicures just because they make me happy.

and then i got my first tattoo in March.

then a few weeks later, another one. i have five now. and here's the thing nobody tells you about tattoos when you have body confidence struggles, i put them exactly where i used to be most insecure. my thighs. my sternum. my lower back.

and now? i can't stop loving those parts of me.

it's a weird thing. decorating the parts you used to hide and suddenly not wanting to hide them anymore.

i'm not saying tattoos are for everyone. i'm saying find your thing. the thing that makes you look at yourself differently.

but also, and i mean this gently, decenter your parents. decenter your siblings. decenter the general consensus.

you are allowed to want things they don't understand. you are allowed to take the long way. you are allowed to arrive at yourself slowly.

this isn't a diary. it isn't a portfolio. it isn't anything that needs a label.

soft noise is just a place. somewhere to put thoughts that don't fit anywhere else. moments that felt too small to say out loud but too big to forget.

no names. no faces. just words and whatever comes with them.