A friend from a long time ago surprised me by texting this week. She and I had stopped communicating years ago. She was the one to go silent, but when, several years later, she sent me a card wanting me to email or call, I wrote a long letter saying I felt that our friendship had unraveled and it didn't see a way of knitting it back together. We'd only known each other three or so years, and met in the workplace, so when first I moved several states away and then she did as well, and we were two states away. We saw each other a few times, but then our communication after was by phone. She'd asked me for money several times, and I gave her an amount that was a free gift. I didn't want loans to come between us. But her situation with her youngest drove her to despair, and she, in a letter, said she felt I had all the luck and she none. She admitted feeling ressentful, and I responded that we hadn't had a long enough friendship before we moved to really know who each other was. And the distance thing made it impossible to rectify our ignorance of each other. While we were in the same location, I'd been her birth coach, coaching her through 14 hours of labor and in the delivery room with her and her husband, when her third child, a girl, was born.
So the reason for the text this week was that that beautiful girl, now 33, had died of a drug overdose. She'd been struggling since her early teens. I felt the blow, and the tragedy, and the world of pain the friend is in, and I told her so, but will not be resuming the ghost of a friendship because of it. I will pray for her. And, this connection has caused me to revisit a sad episode in my life: the loss of a friend long ago, because she projected onto me what she wanted me to be. And I need to be seen.
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