silence – Muddled Soma

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Detours and Dead Letters – Day 34

January 28, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – How the Friendship Changed

This is part three of a three prompt series. The first post is here and the second post is here.

Jeremy and I did not explode. There was no betrayal, no raised voices, no dramatic final scene with the kind of closure often found in movies with an amazing music and video montage. The friendship changed the way military friendships usually change. One day, the routine is intact. The next day, a family is loading boxes, a moving truck is idling, and the neighborhood has a new vacancy. One day we were hanging out during recess. The next day, he was going back to Texas.

In my mind, it felt like leaving. For Jeremy, it was a homecoming. He acted like the universe was correcting a mistake. He was a Texan through and through. He loved the heat and was ready to say goodbye to the winters. Alaska was, at best, an interruption for him…a detour. Texas was a return. I understood that much, even at that age. Still, understanding did not make his leaving hurt less.

We both said the things kids say when adults are listening. We promised to keep in touch. We said we would write. We said we would call when we could. And of course, we said we would not forget. Those sentiments were offered like bandages, thin and polite, as if language could seal up the gaping wound not even fully realized yet.

I upheld my part of the promise, writing him every week. Jeremy did not. I remember the ritual of writing him more than what I wrote him. I used the same pad of paper every time. I tried to make our ordinary days sound interesting, worth staying connected to. I narrated the small things because small things were what connected us. I wrote about a new snow fort, “our” new teacher, and the new kid who moved into his old house. I folded the letter carefully, far too small, slid it into the envelope, wrote his address, and then I waited.

He never responded. Not one time. At first, I worked hard to excuse his silence. I invented reasons for the friendship to remain intact, even if only on my side of the map. Maybe the mail got lost. Maybe his mother forgot to buy stamps. Maybe he wrote back and it disappeared into some military black hole where all the missing things go. I was loyal, and I was young enough to believe that if I kept showing up, the world would meet me halfway.

Then, slowly, I realized a letter was not coming. I was writing to myself. I was crushed for a long time, and I never talked about it. It did not look like grief adults would recognize. It looked like me becoming even more careful and small.

I did not make another best friend until two moves later, at Plattsburgh Air Force Base. Between Jeremy and Plattsburgh, I learned a lesson that felt less like wisdom and more like a bruise that never healed.

People say they will write. People say they will call. People say whatever they need to say in the last hour before goodbye because the truth is too sharp to hold in your mouth. When people are not close to one another anymore, even if they once were, shit changes. Distance does not just stretch a friendship. It edits it. It removes the ordinary moments that keep love warm and alive. It replaces them with intention, and intention is harder to sustain than people admit because it requires work.

Looking back, I can see something tender under the damage. I kept writing because connection mattered to me. I believed in continuity, even when my life trained me in detours. That belief did not save the friendship, but it revealed something about me. I was the kind of kid who tried to build a bridge. I was the kind of kid who stayed, even when someone else did not.

And maybe that is the quiet hope inside the story. The friendship changed, and it hurt. It left a mark. But it also showed me, early, that I was capable of devotion, of showing up, of loving in a way that was not performative. The loss taught me caution, yes. But the writing taught me something else too. It taught me that my instinct, even then, was to reach out, to connect, to make meaning, so I could stay human in a life designed around leaving.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory

Negative Space? – Day 29

January 23, 2026January 31, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Refusing to Fit In

In an earlier post, I wrote about wanting to belong rather than fit in. That distinction took time to learn. In junior high, fitting in would have been enough. I would have accepted it without hesitation. I would have traded pieces of myself to fit in. At that age, fitting in felt like survival, and survival always felt like success.

By high school, something shifted. After years of practice and a near-perfected “fuck off all the way to the summit of fuck off mountain” routine, isolation no longer felt like punishment. It felt like control. What once registered as exclusion began to register as choice. The same distance that had hurt me earlier now protected me. The difference was not the space itself, but who claimed it.

After the absolute horror of my tenth-grade year in Lawton, Oklahoma, I arrived in Nashua, New Hampshire with no interest in entering the social hierarchy of high school. Lawton had taught me that visibility often came with a price tag I could not pay.

Coming from Oklahoma to New England carried its own gentle violences. More than once, I was asked if I lived in a teepee or wore a feathered headdress. Each question was delivered as entitled humor, which made refusing to answer them even more satisfying. I guess, I was supposed to absorb the insult and provide comic relief in return. Fuck off!

So I withdrew. I did not explain myself. I did not correct anyone. I did not soften the moment for their benefit. I simply refused to participate in the shenanigans at all…until Ms. Peregrine taught me to channel my rage.

Ms. Peregrine’s art class gave me a sanctioned place to not fit in. It was a room that did not require compliance. Rage had somewhere to go. Antisocial behavior was both subject and medium. Silence was not interpreted as failure but as process.

That room held others like me, though we would not have named it that way at the time. Tom, Carol, Zach, and Keith all refused the social hierarchy differently than me. None of us were trying to be alike in our rage. That was the point. Our work shared no aesthetic beyond defiance. The refusal showed up in charcoal, paint, warped proportions, and negative space. What we had in common was not style but stance.

Art allowed me to say things I never had in words. It did not demand neat conclusions or a unified thread that ran through the entire piece. It allowed contradiction. It allowed ugliness. It allowed intensity without apology. For the first time, not fitting in did not feel like absence. It felt like presence, contained and visible. This was the beginning of belonging.

Looking back, I can see the quiet irony. What I thought was withdrawal was actually alignment. Refusal was not the end of connection. It was the beginning of something more honest. Art did not make me belong, but it gave me a place to stand without erasing myself. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes that is everything.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Asshole or Not – Day 18

January 12, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – The first time you realized your parents were human.

When I was twelve years old, I went with my father to his office in the evening, housed in the old hospital on the far side of Plattsburgh Air Force Base. The building had been retrofitted for administrative use, but it had not been emptied of its past. During World War II, wounded soldiers had been flown in from Europe and treated there, and whatever could not be healed had stayed behind. The hallways still held that weight, and the air carried its residue in ways that were difficult to ignore. I already knew some places remembered.

My father asked me to go along with him, so I grabbed my radio controlled car and ran it down the long corridor while he gathered paperwork. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, steady and indifferent, and the sound of my car rolling along the floor occasionally drowned them out before fading again. By then, I had lived with my way of feeling space for four years. I had learned not to talk about it after Alaska taught me that honesty could make adults uncomfortable and cruel. I stayed quiet, observant, and turned inward, practicing a kind of silence about my gift that felt safer than any explanation of it.

I did not see ghosts. What I felt was closer to a shift in temperature and color, like the cool rush that slips through an open door on a hot day and changes the room without asking. It was the aftermath of pain rather than the pain itself. I could feel sorrow pressed into the walls and sense fear lingering where it had once been experienced. Adults liked to say I had an imagination or that I was overly sensitive, but none of those explanations accounted for how a place could hold what happened there long after the people were gone. At twelve, I already understood that some spaces spoke and that not everyone was taught how to listen.

That night, the building responded. Lights turned on after being switched off, sounds traveled from empty rooms, and doors settled without hands. My father stopped moving, and I watched him listen as his shoulders tightened, as if his body understood before his mind caught up. It was the first time I had ever seen fear arrive without permission.

Until then, he had existed as certainty, military strong and commanding, the final word in every room he entered. Standing in that hallway, surrounded by something neither of us could control, he was no longer shielded by rank or routine. His fear did not make him weak. It made him ordinary and placed him back among other people, subject to the same unease that finds everyone eventually.

I did not feel triumphant or vindicated as I witnessed my father’s fear. I grew quiet as something inside me recalibrated, subtle but permanent. That night, I understood that my father was not immune or protected by authority or belief, and that military strength did not mean exemption from being afraid or human. Watching him stand there, facing something he could not explain and something I had already learned to live with, showed me who he was. In that recognition, I understood myself, and something I had trusted and known about him loosened. Asshole or not, he was human.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Piercing the Silence – Day 17

January 11, 2026January 11, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A time that the role you played in your family cracked or stopped fitting.

I never found Salisbury Beach to be subtle. It did not whisper. It announced itself with salt hanging heavy in the air, fried dough grease clinging to clothes, and the low mechanical groan of rides that had already lived several lifetimes past their prime. The boardwalk felt stitched together from weathered planks, cigarette butts, suntan lotion, and memory, each step resting on layers of use and neglect that no one bothered to hide.

The boardwalk was loud in a way that felt earned, and I understood that kind of noise, as I lived close to Massachusetts, rough and entirely unapologetic. Arcade bells rang like slot machines, triggered by quarters warmed in palms that had already lost far too many and still kept feeding the machines anyway. Everything about Salisbury felt temporary and permanent at the same time. Rust showed through peeling paint. The ancient ocean breathed steadily just beyond the chaos, indifferent to the noise, the prizes, and the bravado. And still, the boardwalk pulsed with life, a narrow strip of wood holding together sound, sugar, salt, and the stubborn insistence that summer might last just a little longer.

I watched teenagers strut in loose packs, performing indifference while carefully cataloging everything around them. Eyes slid past one another on purpose, yet nothing escaped notice: tank tops, cutoffs, and hair stiff with salt and AquaNet. Every glance carried calculation, and every laugh landed a little too loud, revealing confused confidence. Everyone was playing a role and trying on identities that only summer allowed. Some aimed for tough, others for untouchable, desired, dangerous, or simply older than they were. The boardwalk served as the stage, the crowd became the mirror, and becoming someone new felt possible as long as the lights stayed on and the night refused to end.

I went to Salisbury Beach in Buckie’s 1982 brown Ford LTD that smelled like vinyl, heat, and his mother’s lipstick stained Virginia Slims butts still sitting in the ashtray. I wanted to get my ear pierced on the boardwalk. I wanted proof that I could change something about myself, even if it was small and permanent at the same time. I knew my father would flip out. I carried that knowledge with me the whole ride, heavy but no longer enough to stop me. I was sixteen and exhausted from being quiet and observant. I was tired of shrinking. Tired of watching life happen from the edges. That hole made by the needle was not about jewelry. It was about choosing to be heard, choosing to be seen, and deciding that silence was no longer the safest version of who I could be.

When I got home, my father did exactly what I expected. He unloaded every fear he carried about himself into me as certainty. I would never find a job. I was unworthy. I was a failure, just like my brother. The words came fast and sharp. But something had shifted. The role I had played my whole life no longer fit the moment. Observation failed me. Silence offered no protection. Keeping the story suddenly felt like complicity.

So I spoke. Not carefully. Not strategically. I told him to go fuck himself.

That was the crack. The moment the observer stopped being useful. The moment the storyteller stepped into the story and risked becoming the problem instead of the witness. I did not become safer that night. I became louder. And once I crossed that line, there was no returning to the quiet child who believed that watching was enough.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Finders Keepers – Day 16

January 10, 2026January 10, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – What role did you play in your family?

I was the baby in my family. My brother and sister were older than me by several years, old enough that by the time I reached preteen age, they were already gone. My brother went into the military. My sister married into the military. Apparently, the military was the family business. The house grew quieter. The orbit shifted.

As the baby, I watched. Silence felt safe. Observation felt necessary. While others reacted, I absorbed. While the room moved, I stayed still long enough to understand what was actually happening. Being the youngest meant I was present without authority. Decisions were made above my pay grade and explanations were optional at best. I learned to read tone before words and posture before intention. I noticed how laughter sometimes arrived too quickly, how stories and jokes could function like smoke, how playfulness could smooth over things no one wanted to face directly. I understood the role of distraction even when I refused to perform it. Instead of entertaining, I studied the moment the room needed to be entertained.

I became the observer because no one asked me to be anything else. I was small enough to disappear and quiet enough to be underestimated. That invisibility became access. I watched tension build and release. I watched who needed to be soothed and who needed to stay unaware. I noticed who carried the emotional weight and who benefited from keeping it unnamed. I learned that some roles exist to protect the system rather than the people inside it. Those patterns mattered to me even when naming them made others uncomfortable.

Somewhere in all that watching, I became the storyteller. Not the loud one. Not the funny one. Just the keeper of the stories. I held the version of events that existed before they were softened. I remembered what came before the joke and what never made it into the retelling. I learned that stories shift depending on who is listening and that truth is often traded for comfort without anyone admitting the exchange.

The storyteller role was lonely. It meant holding meaning without a place to set it down. It meant knowing things too early or too clearly. It meant understanding that telling the truth outright could destabilize a balance everyone depended on, even if that balance was fragile and false. So I learned patience. I learned restraint. I learned to let stories mature until they could be told without blowing the room apart. I learned that timing matters as much as honesty.

I did not soothe my family through story. I soothed myself by understanding the stories. I organized chaos into narrative, or at least I tried to. I tracked cause and effect. I stitched moments together into something coherent so I could survive them. That instinct followed me into adulthood, into classrooms, into leadership, into writing. I still sit quietly at first. I still watch how people move when they think no one is paying attention. I still tell stories not to entertain, but to reveal.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Adventures in Moving: ALCAN Edition – Day 15

January 9, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A family story that shaped how you saw yourself.

Family stories are told around the table to remind us who we have been and how we survived becoming who we are. They keep history alive, not in textbooks or archives, but in voices that know where to pause and when to laugh. Sometimes these stories shape how we see ourselves. Other times, they simply allow us to recognize ourselves inside someone else’s memory, and how we are seen outside of ourselves. In that recognition, connection happens. Not because our lives matched, but because the feeling did, or at least should have?

These stories carry more than nostalgia. They show us how anger was handled, how grief was avoided or honored, how love showed up…or did not show up. Long before anything happens to us, we have already been taught, quietly, how we are supposed to respond by who speaks, who stays silent, who fixes things, and who leaves the table early.

Family stories teach us what is celebrated and what is buried. They reveal which parts of the truth are told with ease and which ones are edited for comfort. Over time, I realized that I did not just inherit eye color or mannerisms. I inherited scripts. Expectations. Reflexes. The way a future moment might unfold has often already been practiced in the retelling of the past. Listening closely gives me a choice. I can honor the story without repeating it exactly. I can keep the memory alive while deciding how the next chapter sounds when my voice enters the room.

This story was told repeatedly in my family and has offered me wise counsel for my future self. My family was moving from March Air Force Base in Los Angeles, California to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska. Of course, we drove. Military families often drive because it is cheaper, longer, and character building in all the wrong ways – Adventures in Moving™. The highway that connects the lower forty-eight states to Alaska is the ALCAN Highway. It was still unfinished even in the early 1980’s. Smooth pavement would suddenly disappear into gravel, potholes, and dust. Civilization vanished for long stretches. It was a road that demanded endurance and offered very little grace in return.

Somewhere in Canada, we stopped at a small diner. The kind with thin walls, vinyl booths, and a quiet that made every sound matter. We sat down, ordered drinks, and tried not to look like exactly what we were: a tired military family passing through a place that was not ours. My father got up to use the bathroom.

What happened next became legend.

The bathroom walls betrayed him, loudly and repeatedly. The sounds were unmistakable and entirely public. They echoed through the thin walls and into the dining room. Every person in that restaurant knew exactly what was happening. There was no hiding it. No dignity left to salvage.

My mother did not laugh. She did not smile. She did not lean into the absurdity of it. She stood up, gathered us, and marched us out of the diner in silence. We waited outside by the car, humiliated and rigid, while my father finished what should have been a private moment. When he came out and realized we had left, there was no humor. No apology. No acknowledgment of how ridiculous or human the moment was. There was only anger and tension.

This is the part that has stayed with me over the years. No one softened the moment. No one repaired it. No one said I am sorry or this is funny or we will laugh about this later. It was a shared experience that somehow belonged to no one and taught nothing except how not to be together. That story shaped me because it taught me what I wanted instead of that.

I wanted someone to laugh with. I wanted someone who could sit in discomfort and still choose kindness. I wanted apologies to exist, even for small things. I wanted mistakes to be survivable. I wanted love that could handle embarrassment without turning it into punishment. I wanted partnership!

Life is not fully paved. It shifts without warning. Smooth moments give way to rough stretches. What matters is not the road itself, but who you ride with and how you treat each other when the pavement disappears. That diner taught me that silence can wound more deeply than noise. And it taught me, very early, the kind of person I hoped to become when the road got rough.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Fine, and Other Lies We Learned – Day 14

January 8, 2026January 9, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – What was a secret your family carried?

Pink Floyd, Van Halen, Skid Row, Meat Loaf, U2, Ozzy Osbourne, and even Barry Manilow gave me heart and gave me a language I could own. Their songs taught me how to feel without apology and how to sit with emotion long before I had the words, the permission, or the safety to do so. Music became my private tutor. However, that education came at a cost.

At fifty-one, my ears feel at least twenty years older than the rest of me because concerts were never simply live shows. They were full-body immersion experiences built from stacked speakers, vibrating floors, and sound loud enough to register as belonging, even for the most awkward of us packed into the crowd. Like most people my age, I never protected my hearing because it never occurred to me that I was borrowing against something future me would need to navigate ordinary life.

Now conversations require intention and precision. If someone does not speak clearly, with attention to tone, volume, and rhythm, the words scatter before they reach me, and I find myself asking for repetition or filling the silence with a reflexive huh. I miss parts of sentences and occasionally whole meanings, and whispers are simply not accessible to me anymore. Still, I carry no regret because losing the ability to hear whispers forced me to notice something I had been living with all along.

Whispers had always been part of my life, long before the music ever stole them from me. Whispers and mumbled speech were the true secret my family carried, not one dramatic confession or a single locked drawer hiding a headline-worthy truth, but something far quieter and far more durable. The secret was cumulative, made of a thousand small omissions, a thousand almosts, and a thousand things that were never named but were felt every single day.

The secret lived in the spaces between words. It lived in dinners where everyone ate but no one spoke about what hurt. It lived in rules enforced without explanation and affection that arrived sideways through duty. It lived in silence that passed for peace and order that pretended to be safety. Nothing was hidden exactly. Everything was simply unattended.

Each person in my family carried their own version of the unspoken. Grief without language. Anger without permission. Fear disguised as discipline. We learned to move around one another carefully, like furniture in a dark room, memorizing where not to step. Over time, caution became habit, and habit hardened into our culture.

Those secrets were never malicious, at least not at first. They were inherited. They were learned through the belief that survival mattered more than honesty, that stability mattered more than intimacy, and that asking for help meant failure. The secrets survived because they felt normal, because they never announced themselves, and because they whispered. That was the most dangerous part. No one ever learned how to hear them.

No one named the absence. No one said that something essential was missing. We were fed, housed, dressed, and moved efficiently from place to place. On paper, we were fine. The secret hid inside that word until fine became the highest achievement and the finish line. I grew up believing that families simply endured one another, that love was proven by staying rather than speaking, that conflict was something to avoid rather than move through, and that feelings were personal inconveniences best handled alone. I did not know these were beliefs. I thought they were facts.

When the secret finally revealed itself, it did not arrive as scandal, but as grief. Grief for what none of us were taught. Grief for the conversations that never happened. Grief for the care that wanted to exist but never learned how to speak. Our secret was grief.

Tag: silence