The Scrambled Eggs to Life is a memoir about love, loss, intuition, and finding your way back home to yourself.

Through real stories told with humor, honesty, and quiet grit, Hailey Miles shares the moments that shaped her life. Young love that burned hot and ended too soon. Grief that cracks open your world in a way nothing else can. A hierarchy to grief that taught her to shrink. And the long, imperfect climb back into her own voice. Set in the Oregon woods, along riverbanks, and on the open road, this book unfolds through the people, places, and experiences that changed everything.

In short, powerful chapters like Always Pack a Tarp, Kid, What Would Kate Do?, and Break Up With Him, Babe, Miles explores deep friendship, complicated family ties, spiritual awakenings, and the kind of love that does not end when someone is gone. These stories are raw, funny, tender, and deeply human.

Blending memoir and personal reflection, This memoir is for those who have loved deeply, lost painfully, doubted themselves, and still kept going. It is about learning when to rest, when to fight, and how to trust yourself again. It is about coming home to yourself, one hard-earned step at a time.

The grief and heartbreak clung onto me like quicksand, attempting to slowly swallow me whole.
Every move, no matter how small, pulling me deeper into my despair, heavier, harder, further away from the happiness and freedom I once lived.

 

How did I end up here? 

 

What went so wrong?

 

I still wondered. 

 

My life had been beautifully laid out before me, exactly as planned. A fiancé to come home to. A career I worked hard to build up. A large and loving support system. All things I never thought could disappear. 

 

The happy, loving woman that I once embodied before my life fell apart over and over was out of reach, waiting at the top of the sand dune for me to make my way back up to her.

 

Between us?

 

An ostensibly never-ending mountain of soft sand. Grief, heartbreak, rumors, guilt, regret, isolation, and a hierarchy to grieving that I had been intentionally pushed down to the bottom of.  

 

I kept trying. Heavy steps into the soft sand, legs burning, sweat dripping down my face, sand sticking everywhere. Time and time again, I would find myself back at the bottom of the dune.

 

Was I meant to be stuck down here
forever?

 

I tried to justify it, surely, they must need me down here, alone. I must deserve it. Perhaps they were right and I “just needed to understand.”

 

Needed to understand what?

 

That the life I once lived needed to be erased in order to be palatable to those who I thought loved me just a few short months ago? That I didn’t deserve my voice, pain, or memories to be heard? 

 

Was it true? 

 

Was I the horrible person I was suddenly being treated as?

 

Perhaps I really didn’t have the same right to grieve out loud, or as deeply, as everyone else, because their pain was so much deeper than mine.

 

I made myself smaller, quieter, hoping that shrinking myself to be unseen meant less pain for those who were now hurt merely by my existence. It seemed to be what they wanted, and occasionally even demanded, my removal from a life I never thought would end.

 

My life, his life, our life.

 

Not wanting to cause pain to anyone else, there I stayed, stuck in the sand of my silence and pain. It was all-consuming, filling my pockets and shoes. I would carry it home and it would slowly consume me, making its way into every nook and cranny of my life.

 

Still, I pulled myself through the motions, dragging through the sand, attempting to put on a smile and return to the career that was slowly slipping through my fingertips.

 

Hearing only my blinker, I turned onto the highway, forcing myself to go to work. The bright sun of summer caused my already painful and swollen eyes to squint more. The sores around them from the constant tears stinging once again, reminding me of all of the pain that was my new normal.

 

I couldn’t escape it. 

 

I inhaled the smell of exhaust as my eyes focused on the bright orange diesel tow-truck just ahead in the lane adjacent to mine. 

 

My eyes finally focused.

 

There it was.

 

A culmination of my heartbreak, leading me to work.

 

A shell of who I was once, I just stared at the reality that was in front of me, unable to look away or feel…anything. My hands rested on my steering wheel, as numb as my heart. All I could muster was an uncomfortably dry gulp. Even swallowing had become hard.

 

Crumpled metal. The remains of a passenger seat that used to be mine, the same one that another woman had been in. The seat that took his life. Shattered glass, mirroring the endless broken pieces of my heart. A twisted, devastated moment where a life once was…and a lifetime of memories we will never have. 

 

That painfully slow drive stole any chance I had at gripping onto denial. This was in fact the reality of my life now. The reality of all our lives.

 

We stopped, side by side at a red light.

 

His beautiful face, the one that felt like home, wasn’t there to yell “I love you” out of his window, living now only in my memory. My chest tightened from the longing to hear the sound of his sweet voice, to see that smile just one more time. 

 

How could this be real?

 

I couldn’t even cry.

 

I was a zombie-like shell, devastation so thick in the air I could have choked on it. No matter where I went, it held me hostage, just like quicksand.

 

--

 

It was a long climb, one that took twelve years after that excruciatingly long red light. Eventually, I allowed myself to empty my pockets, and my shoes, which had been filled with sand for far too long. Through that long climb I was transforming and gathering every lesson that came along the way. Finally coming back home to myself.

 

The innocent version who never had to grasp the concept of grief so thick that it was all she could taste.

 

The strong one, who knew it far too well and made it to the top regardless.

 

Meeting fully, for the first time.

 

I let out a scream at the top of the dune, one so powerful and from the depths of my being that only the ocean itself could absorb all of the years of pain and silence that it held. Fresh air.

 

Finally.

 

My scars had turned into magic. I made it; barefoot, light, free and fully grounded as the woman I was meant to be. 

 

This book holds both versions of me and every one in between. It tells the unfiltered, raw truth of my best and worst days. It reveals what it is like to grieve young love while also being misunderstood; a combination that was devastating. It holds memories that, until now, were just between me, the trees, and God. I hope it helps to demonstrate that no matter how soft that sand may be, we can make it past the dune and back home to ourselves.