The humming of the refrigerator in my current apartment always sounds too loud when I'm anxious. It's a low, rhythmic drone that, if I close my eyes, pulls me back to a kitchen in Sofia that smelled of stale cigarettes and floor cleaner that never quite got the dirt up.
In Bulgaria, silence wasn't peace. Silence was a tripwire.
I remember my mother's voice most—not because she screamed, but because of the way she whispered. She had this way of looking at me, her eyes tracking the movement of my hands like she was waiting for me to break something just so she could tell me how much of a burden I was.
She didn't hit me; she just dismantled me, piece by piece, until I felt like a ghost in my own skin. When the divorce finally tore the house apart, she didn't fight for me. She looked at me with a terrifying kind of relief, packed a single suitcase, and left me with the man she had spent years telling me was a monster.
Living with my father was different. If my mother was a cold winter, he was a thunderstorm that never broke.
I remember the "rules." Don't make noise. Don't ask for food. Don't be seen when the men with the heavy jackets came over. He didn't see a daughter; he saw a witness he hadn't asked for. He spent his nights in the garage or hunched over the kitchen table, the metallic clack-clack of his "work"—the illicit parts, the cold steel of weapons that didn't belong in a home.
Once, I accidentally knocked over a glass of water while he was on the phone. The sound was tiny, but the air in the room vanished. He didn't move at first. Then he turned, his face a mask of such pure, focused loathing that I felt my heart stop. He didn't say a word; he just pointed to the corner. I stayed there for six hours, watching the sun go down, shivering because the heater was broken and I was too afraid to ask for a blanket. To him, I wasn't a person—I was a nuisance, an after-thought of a life he regretted.
The day he was arrested was the quietest day of my life. I watched from the window as the police took him away. He didn't even look back at the house. He didn't look for me.
At fifteen, I was standing in the middle of a ransacked apartment with nothing but the clothes on my back and a hollowness in my chest that felt like an abyss. When the social workers took me to the orphanage, they told me it was a "new start." But all I felt was the weight of being discarded.
It wasn't until years later, when I found the scene subculture and the screaming catharsis of metal music, that I realized I could use noise to drown out those whispers. I dyed my hair neon because I wanted to be impossible to overlook. If I was bright enough, loud enough, and bold enough, maybe no one would ever be able to treat me like a ghost again.
But sometimes, when I see a headline calling me "unstable" or "violent," I hear my mother's whisper again, echoing from a kitchen across the world:
I look at my bleached hair in the mirror and grip the edge of the sink until my knuckles turn white. I am a Faulkner now. I have to believe that. I have to believe the girl from Sofia is dead, even if she still screams every time the room goes silent.
I try to fix my hair, but my fingers are clumsy. The bleached strands feel like straw. I want to wash the blood off, but I'm afraid that if I go to the sink, I'll see my father's eyes looking back at me from the mirror. I'm afraid I'll see that cold, clinical detachment he had after he'd cleared a nuisance. I pull my knees up to my chest on the hard plastic chair, trying to make myself as small as possible—back to seven years old, back to the linoleum floor, waiting for the shadow to fall over me.
The refrigerator hums. The light from the hallway spills under the door, a thin yellow line that doesn't reach my feet. I close my eyes and count my breaths, trying to find a rhythm that doesn't sound like waiting.
One. Two. Three.
The girl from Sofia is dead, I whisper to the dark.
But her ghost still knows how to haunt a silent room.