Tough to Say for Sure.

Monday morning, same as almost every other day, I got a text from my friend in FL. It just read "mornin" and I responded with my usual: "Morning. How goes?" Her usual response followed - "It goes, u?" - and the conversation went from there.

The weather turning colder again here. Humidity in full force there. The request to chat, turned down because Monday is my work-week prep day for paid jobs, and I had a decent amount to get done. I asked about an interview she was supposed to have that day with a recruiter and got back a TBD. We texted back and forth a few more times, I wrote the wait and watch blog, she did her day's stuff, and we reconnected around 2pm.

We chatted on the phone when she'd finished with the interview. I didn't notice anything very out of the ordinary, other than she sounded tired. The call went on for almost 2 hours, just back and forthing on everything happening in our lives. At almost 5pm, I got another text saying the interview had asked for professional references and that I was obviously on the list. I 👍 the message, and that was that.

All pretty typical.

I didn't hear from her Tuesday. We don't talk EVERY day, and given the call durations when we do, it's probably a good thing. Neither of us would ever get anything done. She also knows that I actually have to post the work-week things I've prepped on Tuesdays, so it's not out of the norm to miss that particular day. I didn't think anything of it.

Instead, I got a call from my "wife" — we're not married, obviously, but we're about as close as sisters, and once upon a time years and years ago there were jokes about sister-wives, and the "wife" moniker stuck. She and I talked about cancelling reservations we'd made a month or so previously, because her husband is in the military and plans changed, as they often do with military couples.

I went down to FL a couple of weeks ago. I brought a Kanban board, anxiety and the worry of someone who's tried to help someone before to no real avail. It had turned out okay before, but it's exhausting to have that sort of relationship. The ones where you WANT someone to be okay but you also want to stop feeling like the person who has to drive five hours with a hand-made board to help MAKE someone be okay. The responsibility of it all. The dependence.

Wednesday I didn't hear from FL friend again, which was actually a little odd. But I was also fighting with the property management company over multiple work orders that have been "pending further review" for over a month, so I spent an hour of that morning on the phone with them. A few weeks earlier, we'd had a mirror fall — not appropriate mounting, I suppose, before we ever moved in 7 years ago. Tuesday afternoon, they'd come to replace it with a mirror significantly smaller, and I was less than pleased. Wednesday, then, was a whirlwind of documentation, phone calls, and Certified letters in an effort to get the largest property management company in the US to actually manage the property.

The silence from FL barely registered. I was consumed with once again having to fight our way back to a livable home space.

My SO got home from work as usual. 5:30pm'ish. We started making dinner, and when a break in the prep work came, I noticed I had 2 missed calls and 2 texts from Hawaii, both asking me to give her a call back when I had a minute. That was unusual, because the same time I'm cooking dinner in GA, Hawaii is at work, mid-morning. It's not a time she calls, typically.

Naturally, I called back. On speaker.

She asked if I'd talked to FL friend. When I said sure, on Monday, she said: well, I've got some news.

What followed was her frazzled description of a wall of text — scroll and scroll to read it all — that FL friend had sent Hawaii that day. It included an offer to stay up late, because FL was apparently okay with a wall of text across a time difference but not okay with calling while Hawaii was at work. The text was about my visit two weeks prior. The cocktails the first night with a high school friend — my out, the white lie that seemed better than just saying I have GOT to get out of here for a minute. The whole visit, apparently, had been sitting wrong with her. Hawaii called FL from work.

Once she called me afterwards, Hawaii was agitated. Righteously angry, because she knew. She knew I'd been down there, knew why, had been hearing about the issues for some time and knew this wasn't the first time something like this had happened. She knew the cocktails were an out. She knew I had spent money to go down there. She knew I'd spent days researching aid programs. She knew I'd gone down with a Kanban board and printouts and websites and everything I could think of. She also knew it was not something I was looking forward to, and that I'd been worried I'd end up with FL friend on the brink of mental collapse, or no FL friend at all.

We have all known each other for about 15 years. We met at the same crappy job. FL friend and I have kids the same age. We lived together at one point, and I homeschooled both children.

There is a history. During the time we lived together, she went on a date that ended in rape. It was terrible. Absolutely horrendous. And that instance brought up childhood memories of incestuous abuse by her grandfather. She lost it, understandably. For weeks we talked and tried to muddle through what was happening in her mind, and for weeks the battle was lost. Finally, we agreed she needed to talk to someone who had some experience, and I took her to the mental institution, where she stayed for 2 weeks.

I had a kid in the house. A dog. She had a kid in the house. Her 2 dogs and 2 cats. One of the kids was registered for camp in TN the next week. I had to talk to the kids about what was happening without alarming them. I had to call her kid's dad and explain to him what was happening without alarming him. I ended up taking him to TN to the camp. I went back and forth on visiting days bringing her necessities, and I dropped everything when the phone rang from the facility's number, not knowing if she just needed to talk or if something less palatable had happened.

When she got out, she got laid off on the first day back to work. There was a week or so of anger and disbelief, then the process of finding another job. Then our lease was up, and I moved in with the SO — 7 years ago, almost on the nose — and she found a job in Boston. We kept her animals while she went up and got settled. Things seemed okay for a while.

The job lasted not even a year. She found another remote job and moved back to FL because the cost of living is less. Both kids went to live with their fathers. Things settled down.

And then 3 years later, she quit her job. Money got short. I gave her $2K. An ex-coworker's family got all of her bills caught up right about the time she finally found another job. So when THIS instance happened — the layoff, the business attempts, the visit with the Kanban board — everyone but her was already on alert.

Sitting outside after working in the kitchen on Wednesday evening, phone on speaker, I felt foreboding. And shock. And relief. And betrayal. And disappointment.

The relief was specific: she has made it so that I no longer have to be her person.

The betrayal was also specific. While on the phone with Hawaii, she was throwing out accusations. That I'd supported her bakery (latest business) and then come down and told her to get a real job. That I explode every time things don't go the way I want. That I am emotionally abusing my SO — who, by the way, is a grown-assed 48 year old man, plenty capable of taking care of himself. That I'd only come down there to get a solo trip to the beach. That the drinks with the HS friend were proof.

What I'd actually said about the bakery was that I thought it could work, but that she needed to be making money. So she should still work on it, just not in a way that required spending money. If she got an order, great. But don't just bake things for the sake of it or hoping to sell them at a market that often required paying for the booth too. Don’t take custom orders you have to purchase equipment to make - it cuts into the bottom line. 

And when you do have a job again, keep doing the bakery on the side. Eventually you’ll be able to quit the one you don’t want for the one you DO want. It’s just not growing fast enough to make enough money to pay your bills. (Her son, freshly 18 and about to graduate high school with a part-time job at the Goodwill, helps pay bills. Household bills.)

The sugar daddy joke — something I have made for years, about both of us — landed as a deep offense.

The suggestion of Medicaid, so that she could actually get care for her diagnosed PTSD, Bipolar, Anxiety, and ADHD: appalling.

And through all of it — all of those feelings, all of those accusations, all of that conversation about who I am and what I'd done with my wife in Hawaii — she never once talked to ME. She still hasn’t. I’m starting to believe she will not. My wife told her she should call, because there was absolutely no way my wife wasn’t going to let me know. She said it out loud during the conversation. Everybody knows if you want me to know something, my wife will first defend and then report. The friend every human needs.

I don't know if the diagnoses are the reason for her being fine on Monday, mad enough to reach out to someone else in search, I suppose, of an ally on Wednesday - two weeks AFTER the initial trip. I don't know if she genuinely believes the accusations she made are who I am as a person. I don't know if she's deflecting. I don't know what is happening inside any of this.

In her mind, I think I lost her two weeks ago when I was down there. It just took her that long to get here. And for whatever reason, she couldn’t just call me. She had to betray my confidence. She had to accuse me of things. She had to basically attempt to defame me. 

In my mind, I've been losing her since that night she got raped. She was diagnosed, and she just hasn't been the same.

You can do everything you can think of to do. You can truly be attempting to help someone you love. You can show up with the board and the printouts and the research and the 10 hours of driving and the years of being the one who answers when the phone rings. And sometimes you still can't see what's happening inside. You can't diagnose from the outside what someone won't show you from within.

I don't know if I'll hear from her. I don't know what version of events she's carrying.

What I know is what happened on Monday. And that on Tuesday it was fine to be quiet. And that on Wednesday, at 5:30pm, making dinner, my phone had two missed calls.