A Life of Your Own — Heathen & Honeysuckle by Sarah A. Bailey

Everyday I live with the blessing and curse from the knowledge that my life is irrevocably, incredibly my own.

I go to sleep at night feeling the weight of loneliness sinking into my chest. It blooms in my ribs, climbing up my throat and stinging my eyes as my mind races through all my past choices. How did I get here? I wonder, as I struggle to turn in my own bed. My dog Stash has decided to sleep dead in the middle of it, paws extending like she’s trying to push me off a mattress she absolutely didn’t pay for.

Lives are made of infinite choices, and the feelings and thoughts that live behind them. The fact we have them is a gift made of millions of coincidences that ended up in the existence of us, and the experience of it is a journey both lonely and amazing in equal measure. When the sun’s up and I’m out in the world, I relish in the relief of fresh air and the smile on the barista’s face as she hands me my taro latte. I work by the window with a view of the words: LOVE YOURSELF graffiti’d on the building across the road. But when the sun’s down, it doesn’t matter whether the other side of the mattress is warm or not.

My brain’s alone. My thoughts are on my own. And I wonder: if I died tomorrow, would I be happy with the life I’ve lived?

Heathen & Honeysuckle

Page & Vine surprised me with some bookmail a fortnight ago, and I haven’t been more pleased in my entire life. After weeks of stress and a low book count (which is just as dangerous as a low blood count, in my opinion), my physical TBR went from one to three, then seven in the span of a week with two of those being from Page & Vine. I’m so grateful to be able to read these books and share my experience with you and this blog, along with the next post, which will be about Selfie by Kay Cove, couldn’t have been done without their continued support.

Heathen & Honeysuckle is a second chance romance between Darby and Leo. After their teenage summer love ended abruptly at 17, it took a decade and a runaway bride to get the couple to reunite. To get their happy ending, the two of them must confront what happened in their past to rebirth what could happen in their future.

I wonder how I can be in a room full of so many people, and none of them can see the misery behind my eyes.

When we begin the book, Darby’s about to get married. She’s in her wedding dress, getting her hair and makeup done when the thought strikes: nobody sees her misery. Nobody asks how she’s feeling or what she wants. Her parents have organized this marriage to help a business venture, and the only person seemingly on her side is her sister who she’s scarcely allowed to see. Darby teeters on the line of presence and dissociation when her sister comes in, bearing a bouquet of honeysuckles.

It stops her in her tracks.

What are the chances, on the day of her wedding, she gets a bouquet from the one person who has always seen right through her? Even after ten years of silence?

When I wake up, I roll over and check my email.

And there it is.

I’m about to host my first-ever pop-up event. In just two weeks, I will be at Meryendang Pinoy, a Filipino restaurant in downtown Jersey City. My best friends are traveling for the summer. My family’s out of the country. And it hits me: Nobody’s coming.

Not my family, anyway. I have one friend I’ve recently reconnected with coming along with another of her friends, and lucky for me, my eventbrite event gained enough traction to let me know a few people have signed up for the thirty slots I’ve released within days. Still, the heaviness sinks in: the loneliness.

Sometimes, between work and more work, I think people forget: I’m twenty-four years old. Somewhere in this body is the girl who really hoped people came to her birthday party.

Somewhere in this body is the girl who really wished her mom could come and see it.

I think you just need to learn the difference between the rules that matter, and the rules that only truly exist so they can be broken.

The main problem Darby has is the struggle to balance the life she should have with the life she wants to have. When she heads to Pacific Shores, it’s at the orders of her father to keep her away from her sister. The reasoning behind this isn’t explained until the second half of the book, but the main gist is this: the thing that makes Darby different from her sister is that the latter simply goes for the life she wants. Always has, always will—even when it gets her in trouble. Darby can’t imagine doing that.

That is, until she meets Heathen AKA Leo, a surfer in need of some sunshine to chase away his ghosts.

Leo helps her learn that not all rules matter: some are meant to be broken. Rules like no sugar because it increases your size. He teaches her about the value of living your life for you instead of other people. 

As you recall me saying, this is a second chance romance. Second chances don’t exist unless you screw up the first. And Darby did. Because learning to go against the structures you’ve grown up with doesn’t happen in a summer when you’re seventeen: it takes your whole life.

I like second chance romances, even when it breaks your heart. I suppose that’s part of the point: you have to learn that heartbreak to know why it was so important. You have to make the mistake to learn why it was one. In life, you’ll say the wrong thing, take the wrong job, love the wrong people, and you’ll meet an infinite number of roads’ ends. Some are more painful than others, but if you do it right, there’s one thing they all have in common: you get through it. Whether that means turning around, knocking through walls, or building new roads, those deadends are never THE end.

In August of 2019, I was eighteen years old with a very big, very specific dream: move to New York, get a degree, be an actor. I wanted to put down roots. I wanted to be able to bring friends home and cook for them the way I couldn’t growing up. I wanted to have a home. A home where I felt safe, and where I knew the people I loved weren’t going to hurt me. I wanted to be able to look at the skyline, hold my heart, and whisper that we made it through.

Not out. When you grow up in a house the way I did, with the people and flaws I did, you never make it out. Your childhood shapes you. Sometimes, it’s a shadow sewn into your feet, or a cloud in your blue sky. But it’s never you. It’s never everything that you are. So, you never make it out. But you make it through.

Because at the end of the day, you’ve still got you.

I’m afraid that’s when my life, the life I’ve always dreamed I’d someday find, will cease to exist.

Learning is not a linear process, and because of that, Darby goes back to her family at seventeen. Yes, she’s learned to eat dessert through the summer. Yes, she’s learned about sneaking out. More importantly, she’s learned about loving someone because she wanted to, and not whether or not she should. But she’s seventeen and when your family tells you that people can’t possibly love you when you make a mistake and you think it’s true because it’s all you’ve known up until recently, you go back.

You think it’s your only choice.

Darby goes back to her family and she becomes a teacher instead of a florist. She finds a man her parents approve of. She doesn’t fall in love with him, but they like him and he likes her enough. They arrange a wedding because it’s what’s good for the family. It’s what’s acceptable. 

She thinks she can take acceptable, that acceptable is worth settling for.

In 2023, my mother died. I became a teacher and wondered why I was starting to get restless and angry. I all but stopped acting and taking photos. If I looked through my phone from the months after my mother died, I’d find dulled eyes and lips twitching downwards. Aunts and uncles crawled out of the woodwork with advice and opinions on what I should do next, and I didn’t think about it: I just took it.

It wasn’t until about a quarter of the way through 2024 that I realized I’d lost my heart somewhere along the way.

In between highlighting lesson plans and feigning smiles for kids, in skipped lunches and dinners I was too tired to cook, in the dust collecting on my bookshelf: my mind had gone quiet. I didn’t have opinions on anything. I was nothing but a reflection for people around me, shaping myself to be exactly what they wanted.

In October, I realized nobody really stayed.

I crashed like a satellite flung back from the stars. Some part of the equation the scientists gave me failed, and I burned up while I re-entered the atmosphere. The people I loved didn’t love me back. The people I stayed for ran away. The people I missed knew exactly how to reach me and chose silence instead.

Worst of all, I looked in the mirror and realized that all applied to me too.

The third grader that insisted on being loud and speaking your mind took to shredding my heart every time I chose silence to keep the peace. The high school graduate that chased her dreams like it was fate left all the medals in a bedroom I haven’t seen in half a decade. The college student that adapted to a crumbling body and changed the rules to win the game rotted in the corners of her apartment.

I left them all behind because I was told it was what I should do. Because my mom died, and I’d never lived through that before. I thought I would’ve had more time. 

Because I, like Darby, didn’t think I had much of a choice.

I don’t miss their love and affection, because I don’t think they’ve ever given me any to begin with.

Darby runs from the altar and into Leo’s arms. In a days’ long trip from what should’ve been home to what is, she’s reminded of everything Leo brought out in her the first time: the ability to dare for herself. She risks her family’s ire in order to achieve autonomy, independence, and the ability to love.

The reason why Leo and Darby didn’t work out the first time is because you can’t love while you’re stuck in a cage. No matter how golden those bars might look, when you’re in that cell, you can do nothing but survive. Every choice is made from a perspective of high stakes and every unorthodox thought a gamble. You can’t love in that space because you can’t be vulnerable in that space: you don’t have the option to be.

The second time is different. The second time around, she has her sister’s support, urging her to chase happiness and keeping the prison guards at bay. She has her grandmother’s lessons, telling her to chase freedom instead of security. She has Leo, forgiving and determined, telling her that the past doesn’t matter as much as she does.

When you commit to your escape and choose yourself, you’ll find there isn’t a lot to miss. Security isn’t the same thing as love, and control isn’t the same as affection. 

I quit teaching to chase this bookstore, and found my job marketing cookbooks instead. I eat and breathe ink printed onto paper, and while it’s not acting, I found what I really loved about the latter was the storytelling. I’m very fortunate to realize that storytelling can be done pretty flexibly.

So the third grader now has a microphone, the high school grad walks into small businesses with an elevator pitch, and the college student shakes the hand of like-minded CEO’s and calls it collaboration. Slowly, my hair gained back its frizzy curls, and the light returned to my irises. The rain became something to dance in, and the darkness a space to stargaze.

It wasn’t what I wasn’t supposed to do, and because of that I’ve lost contact with a lot of people. There are Christmases I spend with strangers, and birthdays I spend with the company of my inbox, but that’s okay.

The ghosts that used to mock me for being alone now meet an interesting rebuttal: I’m in excellent company. I know what I alone am capable of. I know exactly what I’m fighting for, and I’m proud that I’ve learned that there’s more to life than acceptable.

If I died tomorrow, I’d do it cageless, chasing a dream. And that’s a hell of a lot more than some people get.

And it’s more than enough for me.