One thing about Sofia Melgarejo is that she’s designed to be busy. She prefaces most conversations by giving people a time limit because she has things to do, deadlines to meet, and people to see. There's this strange balance of nonchalance and crippling stress about her, because she's busy, but she'll make time to watch a shitty teen drama with you at a moment's notice.
When I texted her I’d be writing a piece on her, the first message back was "don't expose my secrets pls."
In return, I told her profiles are like love letters to the subjects, and not to worry. But what is a love letter without a secret? What is love without a whisper, a rumor, or the cold hard truth? Loving people can be a secret just as much as an unsolved mystery is.
I’m not trying to find out what really happened to Marilyn Monroe or who the Zodiac Killer is. I’m trying to really know someone I’ve already known for almost a decade in a way nobody else does. I am trying to tell people about her. I’m trying to unearth secrets and help them bloom.
That being said, here are some surface level secrets to start us off: she’s got a habit of overloading her Subway sandwiches with black olives and still asking for more, she drinks a dirty martini or three before she hits the town and muddles olives into the brine, and she has the most spoiled Yorkie on the planet, Cookie, who gets to be pushed around in a stroller, can't really keep her tongue in her mouth, and likes to go paddle boarding.
What do these “secrets” tell me about her? They tell me she tends to be indulgent but can hide it with class, they tell me she’s willing to parade a dog in a stroller and take it to the sea, but mostly, they tell me she really fucking likes olives.
What am I going to do with that? Write a cookbook? Go grocery shopping? Cosplay a Bond villain?
There had to be more. I set out to find it, but she had already asked me not to reveal her secrets. She didn’t want me to deliver her secrets like the sermon on the mount.
It's a good thing I'm not looking to part the Red Sea, but here’s what I have to say about secrets: I’m not a gossip columnist, but we are nothing without the things we hide.
There are things Sofi cannot hide: she will probably never be the tallest girl in the room, or the blondest, but she’ll probably have the fiercest tan (the sun loves her). She might not have a nerdy look, but she’s a Star Wars freak with a double major in film and business. She wants to study law. She owns a single pantsuit. She drives a Mercedes and designs merchandise for her sorority. She is a homebody but won’t miss a Thursday night out. She’s on a scholarship at Indiana University so big they’re practically paying her to sit in classes.
She doesn’t eat raw fish, so she gets cucumber rolls and chicken poke bowls. She loves Chili’s. She listens to The Black Keys but knows every word to the last Bad Bunny album. She’ll criticize every movie you recommend but laugh at every joke on The Big Bang Theory or How I Met Your Mother, no matter how many times she’s rewatched them. She won’t say no to anyone but she won’t lie to them either– she’s brutally honest and a horrible texter. She’s the nicest girl you’ll ever come across and god forbid you hurt one of her friends.
Her mother is her best friend. She’s an only child and the only dead giveaway is how loud she plays her sitcoms when you’re trying to watch your own show beside her.
You’d think a girl like this, a social butterfly with an affinity for olives and an intelligence that is borderline terrifying, would have no secrets.
You’d think she’d be an open book.
So, why did she ask me to keep hush?
Maybe it is because I have known her for so long. She must know I can read her like a book, that the way she feels is never really a secret– you can see it in her face, hear it in her voice, realize it when she’s in her room more than usual.
When she is sad she drags out her vowels, when she’s happy her voice almost resembles Crush from Finding Nemo. When she’s joking around she adds a casual ‘as fuck’ to the end of every sentence. When she’s angry she moves her head around, doesn’t really blink and clenches her jaw so harshly you’d think her teeth would retreat into her gums out of fear of shattering.
When she’s happy, she smiles so hard her eyes close. She dances like a maniac, with her limbs in the air and on the ground, chest pumping, hair flipping, ‘oo-oo-ing’ at the moon like werewolf.
When Sofi is lost, she doesn’t realize she is until she finds herself again. I can tell this is happening because her sentences always end with a question. It is rare to see her like this, and it is not easy to recognize that it is even happening, but when you know someone as well as I’ve come to know her, you wonder how you couldn’t pick up on it in the first place.
I’ve known her so long that I’ve watched the things she keeps as secrets now play out in real time. The deaths in her family, the absence of her father, the return of her father, the head injuries and time spent on stage. The lonely adolescence in the midst of a divorce and the coping mechanisms she used to avoid it. The short skirts at the all girls Catholic school nobody really knows how to feel about anymore, the friendships that went from clear to muddy and reallocated themselves after graduation. The thunderstruck boyfriends and the hurricane breakups. The way she’d come back after the storm.
There’s no hiding from me, and that is scary.
But the thing about Sofi is that no matter how many secrets she thinks she has and works to keep, there’s not a single one that could stall you from adoring her.
That is what is actually scary! Not the secrets and not the need to keep them. No, what is truly terrifying here is the fact that no matter how ugly the truth might be, how dark the secrets are, and how scared she might be to voice them, Sofia Melgarejo will always outshine them.
She cannot be defined by the darkness because she is a light! Do you know how stunning is it to be this way, to be genuinely brilliant? Do you understand just how thrilling it is to be near her when she burns the way she does? How could you even attempt to be cold when there is a raging fire blazing beside you? You can't! You just can't.
Sofi,
You’ll never truly realize how much of your alleged secrets are what make you so extraordinary, so I’ll leave you with this: I will not expose your secrets, but I will love what they’ve done to you.
<3,
nanna
"profiles" #1
March 21, 2023