SOLO

My mother worries about me.

Not in the frantic way - in the quiet, persistent way mothers do when they love you and cannot quite understand you. She believes a woman should have a partner. Someone to do life with, to fill the rooms with. She is not wrong for believing it. It’s just that she has never once heard me say what I’m about to say:

I have been chasing silence since I was seven.

I cannot recall most of my childhood clearly - it comes in flashes - but what I remember most is the noise. Being bullied through primary school meant the world around me was constantly loud in the worst way. So I would close my eyes, in the middle of all of it, and pray. Not for friends, not for it to stop. Just for a moment to hear birds. Not just chirping - but the kind that fills a room and rolls out into the horizon like it has somewhere to be. The kind of quiet that has texture.

I never got it then. But I built my whole life toward it.

Now I live alone and I am not lonely.

There is a difference and it took me years to stop explaining it. I am not disconnected - I am hibernating. I am not closed - I am selective. I have love so full it embarrasses me sometimes. Womanhood, sisterhood - I found myself inside those words. The freedom to be loved without performance, to fall apart without apology, to rebuild slowly and quietly until it feels like you again.

I have someone who dances with me in the rain. Who rubs my back as I lean over a club bathroom toilet at 2am without a word of judgment. Who plays acoustic guitar badly and beautifully at the same time. Who gallivants in the sun like we invented it. Who jams to reggae with the windows down.

That is not nothing. That is everything.

So when my mother looks at me with that gentle worry I know so well - I love her for it. I love her completely.

I don’t need her to see me. Not in the selfish way, but I need her to know I love her. That the silence I live in now is not the same silence I prayed for as a child.

That one was survival.

This one is chosen