The Silence Between the Notes

Music has always been there. It was in the background of childhood, humming from dusty cassette players and skipping CD tracks. I remember lying on the carpet, staring at the ceiling fan while the opening chords of "Tears in Heaven" or "November Rain" wrapped around me like a warm blanket. It wasn’t just a sound—it was refuge.

I grew up in a house where silence was either sacred or dangerous. My mother loved quiet because it meant peace. My father hated it, perhaps because it gave space to things unsaid. But I always listened for what lived between the sounds—the pauses in a piano sonata, the breath before a verse, the silence after a final chord faded.

By the time I was 12, I was teaching myself to play the keyboard we inherited from a neighbor who moved. It was old, out of tune, and missing two keys—but it sang to me anyway. I played by ear. I didn’t know how to read music, and I didn’t care. I memorized progressions the way some kids memorized cheat codes for video games.

At 17, I got accepted to a music conservatory. I thought I had made it. My parents didn’t know what to say. My father wanted me to be practical; my mother said, “Do what makes you happy.” I chose happiness. Or so I thought.

The conservatory was brutal. Everyone was talented—more technically trained, more competitive. My improvisation was seen as amateurish, my lack of theory knowledge embarrassing. One professor once said during a critique, “You play like you’re trying to remember a dream.”

That stuck with me. And slowly, I stopped dreaming.

By the time I turned 23, I had dropped out. I left during winter break and never went back. No email. No farewell concert. Just silence.

I worked in cafes, bookstores, and a warehouse for a while. The piano sat untouched in my apartment. I still listened to music, but like a person watching someone else fall in love. It wasn’t mine anymore.

Grief came later. Not for music, but for my brother. He died suddenly in a car accident at 26. He had been the first person to tell me I had a gift. He once said, “Even if the world doesn’t get it, it doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

I didn’t cry at the funeral. I went home and sat at the old keyboard, still dusty, still missing two keys. I turned it on, and I played.

Something came out of me. A sound that wasn’t quite a song, not quite a cry. Just emotion, translated. It was raw and clumsy and real. That moment changed me.

Music didn’t come rushing back like a flood. It came in drips. First, I started journaling again—writing down lyrics I hadn’t sung. Then I picked up a cheap mic and started recording rough demos in my closet, pillows against the walls to muffle the echoes. It wasn’t for an audience. It was for survival.

One night, I posted a piece online titled "The Silence Between the Notes." It was a spoken word and synth track about grief, hope, and memory. I expected nothing. But a stranger messaged me, saying: “This sounded like what my heart has been trying to say.”

And then another. And another.

I wasn’t trying to "be a musician" anymore. I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I just needed to tell the truth—and music was how I knew to do it.

Today, I still make music. I post monthly tracks and essays. Some are polished, most are not. I write about the loss of my brother, about imposter syndrome, about the loneliness that creeps in during long nights. But I also write about recovery, forgiveness, the joy of rediscovery.

I understand now that the silence between the notes isn’t empty.

It’s where the meaning lives.