Ink and Shadows

Last night, sleep slipped through me like water through cupped hands. Something unnamed twisted beneath my skin, a quiet panic with no face, only presence. And before I could reason with it, I was barefoot in the closet, pulling down journals like lifelines, or maybe landmines. They were all there… spiral-bound survivors with curled edges, leather ones that exhaled the scent of dust and too much time, hardcovers that held the weight of me, pages swollen with grief, ink bled beside brittle funeral roses, their petals pressed flat like the voices I’ll never get to hear again. Each book felt like an artifact from a life I barely survived, as if I had written my own autopsy, one sorrow at a time. I thumbed through them like a ghost retracing its own haunting, unsure whether I was searching for comfort… or confession.

I keep them hidden. Not because anyone’s ever gone looking, no one knows they exist, but because the thought that someone might is enough to make my skin crawl. I bury them beneath blankets and inside boxes covered with random junk on the top shelf in my closet, like they’re evidence of a crime I haven’t admitted to yet. Notebooks full of wounds I stitched shut with silence, tucked away like a bruise beneath long sleeves. But last night, I pulled them out. My hands trembled with the kind of reverence usually reserved for the dead. I opened the pages like doors I swore I’d never walk through again, each one groaning with the echo of the girl I used to be. I read them slowly at first, cautious, like I was approaching a wounded animal that might bite. And still, I kept turning the pages. I let the walls collapse. I sat cross-legged on the floor and let the words devour me, one ache at a time.

It’s a strange kind of heartbreak, meeting the most broken parts of yourself like a stranger. I didn’t recognize her, not at first. I felt pity before I felt kinship. I mourned her like a ghost I never got to bury. But as the words pulled me under, I saw it… she was never gone. She’s been living here all along, beneath the noise and the masks. She’s me. She’s still me.

I write things down like offerings to a god I’m not sure I still believe in, hoping that by giving the memory away, it’ll lose its power to haunt me. That’s the silent agreement I’ve made with myself: bleed it onto the page, and I don’t have to carry it anymore. But forgetting isn’t real, it’s just another mask grief wears when it wants to be left alone. My mind, ever the master illusionist, builds trapdoors and hidden passageways, tucks the sharpest memories behind velvet curtains and dares me to look. It wraps trauma in euphemisms and buries it beneath stories, so I can pretend it was fiction all along. But the body remembers. The bones keep score. And no matter how far I push the pain away, it always knows its way back home.

Because the words are still there… unburned, unburied, waiting. And one day, when I’m nothing but photographs and fading scent, my children might find them. That thought split something open inside me. What will they see when they sift through these pages? Will they recognize their mother, or only the storm I tried to silence? Will they read my rage and mistake it for bitterness, not the bleeding wound it came from? Will they hear the tremble in my voice, woven through the ink, and wonder why I never spoke it aloud? I fear they’ll feel betrayed by the weight of what I kept hidden. That they’ll look at my words and see a stranger staring back, one they never got the chance to truly know. And maybe they’ll ask themselves the same questions I ask in the dark: Who was she, really? And how did she survive it all without letting us see the cracks?

I remember feeling that way about my own mother, like she was a locked room I wasn’t meant to enter. A beautiful, haunted thing I could never fully touch. She didn’t speak much about her childhood. Her past hung in the air like unfinished sentences, and all I ever gathered were whispers passed between my aunts during holiday lulls, half-formed memories dressed as cautionary tales. The puzzle never quite came together, just oddly shaped pieces with no picture to hold them. I used to wonder if she had journals tucked away, too, or if her entries lived only in the vault of her mind, scribbled in invisible ink. I wonder if she, too, feared what might happen if her children saw her whole, if we peeled back the layers and found the ache beneath the softness. Maybe she didn’t keep it from us on purpose. Maybe she simply couldn’t remember. Maybe whatever shaped her did so in shadows, and she learned to survive by turning her face from the flame.

Maybe silence was her survival. Maybe forgetting became her shield. And maybe this ritual of writing and then hiding, of tucking my truth into pages and pretending it belongs to someone else, is mine. My camouflage. My quiet rebellion. I do my best to be honest with my kids. I offer them the PG-version of my pain, sanded down and wrapped in metaphor, wolves dressed in poetry, monsters reimagined as cautionary tales. I hand them pieces of me I’ve made safe for small hands to hold. But the unfiltered version? The raw, unstitched, blood-on-the-floor version of who I am and how I came to be? I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen her. I don’t know if I have. Because the truth is, I’ve lived most of my life behind a curtain, too afraid of what might come undone if I pulled it back. And some days, I wonder if I’ve hidden myself so well… there’s nothing left to find.

Because the truth is that I don’t fully know who I am. Or why I carry these broken pieces around as if they’ll ever come together again. I only know the shape of myself by what’s been broken, stitched, and broken again. A mosaic of scars and tenderness and fight, held together by sheer will and ink-stained memory. So I gathered the pages, those quiet witnesses. I stacked the notebooks with reverence, like bones returned to a grave, and slid them back into their hiding place in plain sight, but still buried. Then, like muscle memory, I whispered the familiar lie I’ve told myself a hundred times before: These aren’t mine. They belong to someone else.

But I felt it this time, how false it rang. They are mine. Every line. Every wound. Every word I was too afraid to say out loud. And they’re still breathing.

One day, my children might find these pages, the ones I wrote in silence, the ones I never meant for anyone to read. And when they do, they might see the parts of me I kept tucked behind my eyes. The parts I was too afraid to speak aloud. They might feel anger or confusion. They might grieve the version of me they thought they knew. They might see more shadow than sunlight, more storm than shelter. But still, I hope they’ll read between the wounds. I hope they’ll know that I didn’t write these things to be inherited, only released. That the pain etched into these pages was never meant to be passed down like heirlooms, it was meant to be laid to rest. A kind of quiet exorcism. A letting go. And if they feel anything at all, I hope it’s the understanding that I was trying to make peace with the parts of myself I never learned how to love.

And maybe they’ll learn that it’s okay to be a walking contradiction. To be both the wound and the healer. To be unfinished, uncertain, unraveling, and still worthy of love. Maybe they’ll see that you don’t have to be easy to understand to be worth holding close. That sometimes survival looks like softness dressed in chainmail. That sometimes the bravest thing you can do is write through the darkness with shaking hands, by candlelight in the bathroom floor. And maybe, if they ever lose their way, they’ll follow the trail of ink I left behind, not as a path to who I was, but as permission to become who they are. 

A reminder that even the most haunted hearts can still be a home.

Author’s Note:
Originally written May 12, 2019 - A raw excavation of lineage, silence, and the ink-stained path to self.

Six years since I sat in the closet floor in the middle of the night, my hands trembling over old journals like they were sacred or cursed, possibly even both. I remember that version of myself like you remember a fever dream… blurry at the edges, but burning in the center. She was exhausted. Split wide open. Trying so hard to make meaning out of her pain before it swallowed her whole. And the truth is… I’m still her. But I’m also someone else now. Someone softer in some places, stronger in others. Someone who doesn’t whisper “these aren’t mine” anymore.

Because they are. They always were.

I think what strikes me most, reading these words now, is how much I needed to say them, how urgently I needed to be witnessed, even if only by the page. I bled all over that paper because I didn’t know how else to make sense of my own survival. I didn’t know how to let go without writing it down first.

But now? Now, I don’t write just to let go. I write to honor what it cost me to still be here. In these pages, I see a kid clawing her way through the dark, desperate for light and terrified of what it might reveal. I see a mother trying to love her children without knowing how to fully love herself. I see a lineage of silence, and the first hands willing to break it open.

And I don’t pity her anymore. I thank her.
Because without her honesty, her brutal, unflinching truth, I wouldn’t have found my own.

I still believe in writing as an exorcism. But I’ve also come to believe in writing as resurrection. Every word I thought was too heavy to carry… became part of the bridge I walked across. And now, when my children ask who I was before I became their mother, I have more than ghost stories to offer. I have pages. I have proof. There’s healing in that. There’s power.
And if you’re reading this now, maybe because you’re sitting on your own floor with a storm in your chest, I hope you know: you’re allowed to be a work in progress. You’re allowed to be a paradox… a walking contradiction. You’re allowed to leave a trail of ink not just for your children, but for yourself. So you can find your way back, when the night feels too long.

This was never just about the past. It was about finally giving myself permission to be whole.

And I have. I'm still becoming, but I have.