The Sound of the Stars

Silence used to frighten me.

As a child, I filled every quiet space with sound—TVs playing in the background, music always on, constant chatter, even when there was nothing to say. I thought noise meant life. Movement. Purpose. Silence felt like something was missing.

But silence doesn’t mean absence. I learned that the summer I lost my father.

It happened so suddenly—one moment, he was in the kitchen, humming Sinatra, pouring coffee; the next, he was gone, his heart giving out like an old song winding down. I remember the way the air felt that day. Heavy. Still. Like even time held its breath.

After the funeral, the house became too big. Too quiet. Every corner reminded me of him. His empty chair at the dining table. His slippers by the back door. The scent of his cologne that still lingered in the hallway like he might walk through it at any second.

I stopped listening to music.

Not because I wanted to embrace the silence, but because no song could drown the ache inside me. Even the happiest tunes sounded hollow. I wasn’t afraid of silence anymore. I was inside it. Wrapped in it like a fog I couldn’t see my way out of.

My mother grieved differently. She threw herself into cleaning, organizing, and pretending. She kept telling people she was "doing okay" with that polite smile that looked like a crack in a porcelain cup.

Me? I wandered. One evening, I ended up in the backyard, drawn to the little wooden observatory my father built when I was twelve. It was a humble thing, with a tin roof and an old telescope pointing skyward like a finger frozen in wonder. He used to call it our “star station.”

I hadn’t been inside it in years.

Dust coated the windows, and cobwebs danced in the corners, but the moment I stepped inside, the scent hit me—wood, metal, and something I couldn’t name except to say: it smelled like Dad. I sat down on the creaky floorboards and looked up through the open hatch at the night sky.

It was breathtaking.

The stars blinked above like old friends remembering something. And then, I remembered his voice:

"The stars sing, you know. We just forget how to listen."

That night, I tried.

I sat in that observatory with nothing but my thoughts, letting the silence do what it wanted. I expected it to suffocate me. Instead, it held me. Gently. Like a lullaby.

And the strangest thing happened.

I heard him.

Not his voice exactly—but echoes of him. In the creak of the wood, in the rustle of leaves outside, in the way the stars pulsed like breathing lights. I pulled out an old notebook and wrote something I hadn’t meant to:

"Grief is just love with nowhere to go."

From then on, every night I could, I went back. Sometimes I cried. Sometimes I wrote. Sometimes I just stared at the stars until my eyes blurred and I wasn’t sure if they were moving or I was.

But every time, I heard something new.

A memory. A word. A silence that wasn’t empty but full of meaning.

It wasn’t healing in the dramatic, movie-ending kind of way. There were no grand breakthroughs, no monologues shouted into the night. Just small things. Quiet things. A poem here. A deep breath there. The courage to say his name without breaking.

Eventually, I wrote a full story—this story, in some ways. I titled it “The Sound of the Stars.” I submitted it to a local literary magazine. It didn’t win. But when they emailed me saying, “Your story stayed with us,” I cried harder than I had in months.

Because I knew he would’ve been proud.

I used to think silence meant something was missing. Now, I know it sometimes means something sacred is speaking—something you can only hear when you stop trying to fill the void and just listen.

The observatory is still in our backyard. My mom keeps it tidy now, like a little shrine. Sometimes, she joins me there. We don’t say much. We don’t have to. The stars say enough.

And when I look up, I think I finally understand what my father meant.

The stars really do sing.

And in that quiet, I can still hear him.