Honey Over Broken Glass

Starting A Heart Rearranged wasn’t just about creating a blog, it was about resurrecting the ghosts I buried in ink, about standing barefoot in the ruins of every version of myself I tried so desperately to forget. It meant flipping through old journal pages like crime scene photos, trying to decide which memories I could let the world witness... and which needed to stay locked away in the dark. Doing this requires dragging old ghosts out of the corners I’d shoved them into, metaphorically brushing the dust off journals I swore I’d never read again, and asking myself, Do I really want to do this? The answer changes by the hour.

Because the truth is, not all of them can be shared. Some wounds still pulse. Some pages feel like touching a live wire with wet hands.

There are entries I don’t even remember writing, like I bled them out and left the room before the body hit the floor. I don’t remember how the sentences formed or how I survived the moments they came from. They exist in someone else’s handwriting, someone else’s pain. And maybe that’s exactly what I was doing all along… surviving by detaching, writing like I was ghostwriting my own agony. 

We all do it, don’t we? Bury memories under a thousand distractions, pack away the ones too heavy to carry, too brutal to rewatch. Maybe I didn’t survive them fully at all. Maybe parts of me stayed behind, trapped in those paragraphs, still gasping for air.

There were so many things I never even admitted to myself until therapy forced me to look them in the eye. Things I never wrote down, because I knew that if I did, it would make them real. Writing it down makes it permanent. Writing demands reflection. And reflection means standing in front of a mirror that shows you the parts you'd rather keep blurred. But these old journal entries, they don’t lie. They’re raw and feral and without pretense. They don’t edit the story for sympathy. And reading them now is like watching footage of a crime I tried to forget. I see the evidence. I see the slow suffocation, the way I begged in between the lines for someone to stay, for someone to see me, and how they turned away anyway. Memory is a clever thing. It softens the sharp edges so we can sleep at night. But these pages... they are knives. They cut through the illusions I so carefully wrapped around my heart. Sometimes you think you’ve made peace with something, only to realize you were never honest about what happened in the first place. I told myself for years that some friendships just faded, that time and distance unraveled the thread, as it sometimes does. It was easier to believe that than to confront the fact that I was abandoned in my darkest hours. That when the world was falling down around me, they chose teenage drama over loyalty. That I was too much. Too broken. Too hard to hold. I finally realized that staying would cost me my soul.

And still, that realization is so haunting. Because grief doesn’t only come for the dead. Sometimes it comes for the living. For the friendships that held your secrets and then dropped them like broken glass. For the people who once said they loved you and later acted like you were disposable. Revisiting these truths means mourning what never got a proper goodbye. It means mourning the version of me who once believed their silence was my fault. And I hate it. I hate that it still hurts. I hate how long I kept rewriting betrayal as miscommunication just to avoid the burn of knowing I was never really safe with them either. But the truth, once spoken, has a weight of its own. And I’m learning to stop carrying what was never mine to hold.

That’s why I hide behind metaphors. I paint the pain in watercolor instead of ink, wrap it in silk so the edges won’t cut so deep. I still catch myself tying pretty bows on horrors, trying to make the grief pretty. If I make it poetic, maybe it won’t feel like razor blades in the mouth. But some experiences refuse to be softened. Some pain is too feral for metaphor. Too ugly to be made beautiful. No matter how you dress it up, it still reeks of what it is- betrayal, abandonment, violation, loss.

So I revisit these stories I’ll never tell. The ones I’ve folded into a box, sealed shut, and buried so far beneath my skin I forget they exist until I flinch when someone moves too fast towards them. Stories I know require an immediate lock on the note. Stories that died with my brother. Stories my mother never even knew. Moments I still can't name because naming them is like ripping the stitches out with my teeth. But even unspoken, they shaped me. They taught my body to be ready to run before my brain even understands the danger. They carved tunnels into my trust, taught me that the people who say they’ll stay sometimes leave mid-sentence. I still scan every room for exits. I still listen for footsteps behind me that no one else hears. I still remember the day someone swore they'd protect me, while holding my sobbing body, trembling in her arms and then turned around and became the very thing I needed protection from. If she could do that... the one who saw the wreckage up close, who bore witness to the collapse of me... then what chance do I have with anyone else?

We tell ourselves the past is over. That we should just move forward. But trauma isn’t some distant landmark we left behind. It’s the road we walk on. It’s the way we carry ourselves. It lives in the hunch of our shoulders, in the way we brace ourselves for disappointment, in the way we rehearse conversations before we say them out loud because we’ve been told too many times that our feelings are “too much.”

I discuss with my therapist all the time about whether any of this is even a good idea. Sometimes it feels like I’m cutting open wounds just to see if they still bleed. But she tells me this is the work. Not the writing, but the returning. The revisiting. The remembering. The dragging myself back to the edge of a memory I swore I'd never touch again and sitting with it long enough to hear what it still has to say. Every version of me I tried to silence still lives inside this skin. And now, through this blog, I’m being forced to revisit each one. It’s violent, honestly. Like dragging myself back through a battlefield, barefoot, blindfolded, heart exposed. Some days, I walk away from the writing feeling emptied out, like I’ve given too much. Other days, I feel like I’m still the villain in stories I never asked to be part of. Still the one holding the guilt that someone else should carry. Still struggling with awarding true forgiveness to people who never even apologized.

Recently, she asked me to write letters to the little girl who wrote those entries, the ones that still reek of blood and silence, the ones that feel like someone else wrote them entirely. She calls it reparenting, but to me, it feels like resurrection. Like dragging a forgotten version of myself out of the rubble and asking her what she remembers. She tells me to pretend it’s my daughter, trembling and tear-streaked, handing me her journal and asking, “Do you still love me, even after this?”

And so I write. I write with a trembling hand. I write things I never heard. I say the words I begged for in silence. I tell her she’s not too much. That she didn’t deserve it. That I’m so, so sorry no one came for her. I write her the safety I never had, the softness I craved with my whole body, the kind of fierce, mama-bear love that shields and protects, no matter what. And when I do, something inside me shatters. Because the truth is… no one ever did that for me. Not a single soul stopped long enough to notice I was drowning. No one saw the shaking hands, the silence that wasn’t peaceful, the forced smiles stretched too tight across a breaking face.

Because when I read those words back, when I imagine them in my own mother’s voice, soft and sure, like honey poured over broken glass, I feel something splinter straight through my ribcage. I want to scream. I want to rip the pages apart. Because she never said them. Not once. Not when I needed it most. Not when I was unraveling in plain sight, barely breathing beneath the weight of it all. She didn’t come. No one did. And that realization is unbearable.

It’s a kind of grief that has no name. A rage so old it feels ancestral. I sit there, clutching the notebook like it’s some sacred relic, and I feel both gutted and guilty… gutted that I went so long without that kind of love, and guilty for still needing it, even now. For still wishing someone would wrap their arms around me and say, “I saw what they did to you. You didn’t imagine it. You didn’t deserve it. And I’m so sorry I wasn’t there.” But no one ever does. So I write. And with every one I put out there for y’all to read also, I try to build a bridge back to the little girl I abandoned. I try to become what I needed. Even when it hurts. Especially then. I write because somewhere, someone else is sitting in the dark thinking she’s the only one who feels this haunted. Someone else is trying to swallow a scream. Someone else is searching for the words that might finally let the pressure out. Maybe she needs to hear that she’s not crazy, not broken beyond repair, not too late to come home to herself. Because I’ve been there too. You’re not the only one who walked through hell barefoot and made it out anyway.

This blog was never just about storytelling.

It was about returning to the scene of my own becoming.
It was about gathering the broken pieces I once tried to discard.
It was about letting them speak… loudly, painfully, and honestly.

Even if their voices shake.
Even if mine still does, too.

Because if no one ever saved me... maybe these words will.
Maybe they’ll save someone else, too.