The Rooms We Don’t Talk About

Before I begin, I want to say this: Glimmers of The Wallflower has always been a kind of open journal for me. A place to gather the fleeting moments that make up a life—some soft and blooming, others tangled in shadow. Not every entry is about hydrangeas or handmade shelves. Some glimmers are quiet. Some are hard. Some ask to be spoken aloud simply because they’ve sat silent for so long.

I’ve written before about my brother Charlie in this post. About what it felt like to lose him. But this is about what came after—the quieter aftermath. The part no one talks about, but the part that shaped so much of who I became.

After Charlie died, things shifted. Not in one big swoop, but in slow, disorienting ways. The kind you don’t always notice at first—until one day, you realize nothing is where it used to be. Not your bed. Not your routines. Not your mother.

At first, I stayed in my parents’ room. I think that was normal for young kids back then—falling asleep next to the rhythm of your parents breathing. But not long after the funeral, that changed. My mother and I moved down the hall to share a room with my older sister. No one explained why. No one needed to. It was one of those changes that made sense only in the way grief does: quietly, without logic, but with a force that pressed into your ribs.

My mother—Anastasia Mary, though I later learned she liked to call herself Ann-Marie—unraveled in ways I didn’t have words for then. I just knew she was scared all the time. If I was out of her sight—even for a moment—she panicked. Not the kind of panic that comes and goes, but the kind that clings. I remember her voice when she called for me, the way it trembled like it had already imagined the worst.

It felt like I was on a leash—but one made of fear, not control. She wasn’t trying to cage me. She just couldn’t bear the thought of another child vanishing from her life.

And then—there was a time when she disappeared.

I was maybe three or four. Old enough to remember the outline of things but not all the details. I recall a stretch where my mother simply wasn’t there. Her absence wasn’t explained; it just…was. I’ve never confirmed it with my siblings, but I think she may have been hospitalized. The kind of place people go when the weight in their chest becomes too heavy to carry alone.

She came back, eventually. But not the same. Quieter. Watchful. Like someone who had once touched fire and never again trusted a flame.

I don’t know if Charlie’s death broke my parents’ marriage, or if it simply revealed cracks that were already forming. But I do know that after a while, my mother moved out too. I don’t remember a conversation about it. One day, she just wasn’t there in the same way.

She and I had shared a room all the way through fifth grade. After she left, there wasn’t really a mother figure in the house. So I went to live with my eldest sister. She stepped in, gave me a kind of steadiness I didn’t even realize I’d been missing. But part of me still carried the weight of that long, slow goodbye. The feeling of being left behind again, without anyone saying the words.

My mother has since passed away. There are still things I’ll never fully understand about her, and maybe that’s okay. But I hold onto the detail of her chosen name—Ann-Marie—as something tender. A whisper of who she might’ve been, or wanted to be, beneath the grief.

These aren’t easy memories to share. They sit in the back closet of my heart, folded between all the things I never really knew how to name. But they’re part of my story. Part of the long, winding path that led me here—writing, reflecting, trying to find meaning in the broken and the blooming.

Not every glimmer sparkles.

Some just flicker in the dark, doing their best to stay lit.

– The Wallflower