When the Past Finds You Again: Reconnecting with “Breanna”

There are certain conversations in life you rehearse for years without realizing you’re rehearsing them.

Not out loud, but quietly, in memories, in “what ifs,” in the spaces where old versions of yourself still live.

Recently, I had one of those conversations.

I reconnected with the friend readers know as Breanna in my books, my childhood best friend. In real life, she was the first person who ever made me feel like I belonged somewhere. The first person who made the world feel safe enough to exhale in. And she gave me the space to be an ordinary kid, with no judgement.

We had drifted, the way childhood friendships sometimes do. No fight. No ending. Just distance, time, growing up, and life moving forward.

But some friendships don’t disappear.

They pause.

Before I Knew How to Say the Words

When we were kids, she never knew the full truth.

She knew I was anxious.

She knew I was quiet sometimes.

She knew I clung tightly to sleepovers and time we got to spend together.

She knew I laughed hard over small things.

What she didn’t know was why.

I didn’t have language yet for abuse.

I didn’t have permission yet to tell anyone.

I didn’t even fully understand what was happening to me.

But children know safety when they feel it.

And I felt safe with her.

Her friendship was steadiness. She gave me something that trauma often steals from kids, the chance to just be a kid for a while. She never set out to rescue anyone. She just existed kindly and consistently, and somehow that was enough to keep me grounded during years when I felt like I was floating outside my own life.

Sometimes survival doesn’t look heroic.

Sometimes it looks like sitting on a bedroom floor laughing about nothing important at all.

The Conversation

As adults, we finally talked.

Really talked.

I told her about the abuse. The fear. The silence I carried back then. The things I never said, the reasons behind behaviors she only saw from the outside. Some scary situations we both lived through, now had explanation.

We both cried.

Not dramatic crying, but the kind that comes from understanding something old in a completely new way. The kind where memories rearrange themselves in real time. She wasn’t crying because she had done something wrong. She was crying because she suddenly saw what I had been going through, and how much she had done right without ever knowing she was doing it.

And in very typical "Breanna" fashion, her protective side came out immediately, she was angry at him. Fiercely angry in the way only someone who loves you deeply can be. Some things, thankfully, never change.

I told her something I had carried for years:

Her friendship helped keep me alive during a time I didn’t know how to survive.

She never knew she was holding a lifeline.

She just held my hand.

The Healing Part

There’s a unique kind of healing that happens when someone from your past finally hears the truth, and still sees you the same way, only with deeper understanding.

Nothing about our childhood changed.

But the meaning of it did.

We weren’t just two kids hanging out.

We were a scared child and a safe place.

We talked about memories that suddenly made sense. About moments she remembered as ordinary and I remembered as refuge. We filled in the blanks for each other, and somehow the past felt softer afterward.

Before we said goodnight, we made a simple agreement:

We won’t drift far again.

We’re going to stay in touch. Intentionally. Grown-up lives and responsibilities and distance included.

Full Circle

Writing Because of Jane and Because of Maddie helped me reclaim my voice.

But this conversation helped me reclaim a piece of my childhood.

Trauma isolates.

Healing reconnects.

Sometimes closure isn’t found in leaving the past behind.

Sometimes it’s found in walking back to it, hand in hand with someone who unknowingly helped you survive it the first time.

We were kids who eventually drifted apart.

Now we’re adults choosing to drift back together.

And there is something deeply healing about realizing the person who once made you feel safe… still does.

Full circle.❤️