I Miss Her. I Love Her.

The first time I met her, she was crying in the church bathroom. Her hands trembled around a tissue, mascara smudged under her eyes. I didn’t know then that her husband had punched her on the way to church. I only knew the look …that stunned, hollow-eyed sorrow that some women wear when they’re trying to believe God still notices them.

We spoke like strangers who already recognized something in each other. She told me she used to be Southern Baptist before converting to Mormonism. I told her I’d left the church but still found myself drifting in sometimes, pulled by habit or longing or guilt, I’m not sure which. My husband recently just accepted a new calling … the kind of thing that sounds noble in the ward bulletin but felt complicated in real life… Anyway… When she told me she’d been baptized just a couple years ago, I wanted to tell her about the ache of faith …how it can both wound and soothe, how belief can feel like swallowing glass when your body’s too full of memory to pretend. But I didn’t say that. I just smiled, exchanged numbers, and hoped maybe I’d made a friend.

Making friends doesn’t come easily to me. I only recently discovered I’m autistic, and it explained so much …the way my chest tightens around small talk, how I replay every text a dozen times, trying to guess if I said the wrong thing. My anxiety knots itself around every new connection like a vine that doesn’t know how to stop climbing.

Still, I texted her, here and there, hesitant and hopeful. Months passed before I visited her house. At church she and her husband invited us over for dinner… My husband and my twelve-year-old son came with me. We had dinner. She talked …endlessly, nervously, circling her life like a bird trapped indoors, crashing again and again against invisible glass. I barely spoke. Her husband refused to let anyone know much of his life… people who do evil things against others often keep their private life and past a secret. I could tell something was up with him but never really questioned it.

At first I thought she was simply a little self-absorbed, but then I realized maybe she just needed someone to listen. And I’m good at that …listening until it hurts, absorbing the storm until it lives in me instead of them.

So I listened.

Months later, she came to my door one late afternoon, crying. Her face looked red and in pain, her voice sharper with exhaustion. She told me her husband had been abusing her… for the years they’ve been together… through mostly the whole marriage. My heart cracked open. I’ve known pain, but there’s something unbearable about hearing it echo in another woman’s voice. We sat in my living room, the air thick and still, and she told me everything. Her words poured out like water through a broken pipe, unstoppable.

That night changed something. She wasn’t just a woman from church anymore. She was someone I wanted to protect.

We began spending more time together. Her little girl loved me. Her dogs, mostly. One of them still growled every time I came near… maybe it sensed my uncertainty.

Sometimes my friend gave me weed … gummies, shared joints, little gifts of calm. I didn’t always need it, but I accepted it anyway. It wasn’t about the weed. It was about feeling wanted. It was about being thought of. Love, in whatever form it arrives, is still love.

She’d tell me stories about her life… about her husband, her exes, her loneliness. She showed me a couple videos and let me hear some recordings of her husband being outright and blatantly cruel to her. She had every right to say any mean thing based off the fact that man child harmed her physically. I felt no sorrow for him. I felt sorrow for her and her daughter. I hugged her and cried. I saw the exhaustion in her eyes, the frantic hunger to feel alive again. Sometimes she’d go out drinking with a man she’d cheated with in the past. I didn’t judge. Not at first. I like him, he’s nice and gentle. She needed that. I told myself everyone’s just trying to survive the only way they know how. But soon, I began to see the edges fraying. She was drinking too much, disappearing too often, leaving her daughter with me and other babysitters for hours that stretched into the early morning. I’d sit in my living room, or hers, her daughter asleep in the next room, I was left wondering when she’d come home … wondering if she was safe, if she cared, if I should call someone, if it was even my place. I didn’t want to be judgmental or cause any problems. I just was confused and unsure if my feelings were right or just my anxiety causing issues.

The night she came home at 3 a.m., drunk, with a random man and her friend, blasting music while her daughter slept … that was when something inside me broke. I couldn’t show it or she’d get angry with me and end our friendship… that’s how it often felt… She started dancing, wild and sloppy, laughing too loudly, brushing against me, against everyone as we sat, whispering to each other when she’d leave the room, that all we wanted to do was talk and chill… she didn’t… she danced freely and played loud music…. as if the night she drank herself into could erase what was left of her conscience. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to ask her who she was becoming. And why…

But I stayed quiet.

Because I knew what it meant to grow up inside chaos.

I just constantly stayed quiet in her presence.

She’s 26… I’m 4 years older. I still feel like a child, and maybe she kinda did too.

I was a child once, too, learning to survive inside houses that reeked of fear. I was beaten, neglected, passed around like a secret no one wanted to claim. Sexually, physically and mentally abused by family members and foster homes… I know what it’s like to live in the wreckage of other people’s decisions… to think pain is just the background noise of living.

That’s why I couldn’t turn away from her. She reminded me of the women who raised me and the child I used to be … both broken and resilient, both trying to build something out of ruins.

But love, friendship kind of love, in fact ALL kinds of love… when it’s one-sided, starts to rot.

She never asked me questions. Not about my life, my dreams, my photography, my writing … nothing. I’d show her pictures I’d taken, and she’d smile, say something like you’re really good at that, and then look back at her phone. I told myself it was ADHD, distraction, survival. But deep down I knew … I could feel its heaviness… she just didn’t care enough to see me. She must have been drowning in her own chaos to even know how to care.

I started to feel used. Like a placeholder. A babysitter, a therapist, a pair of open ears to scream into. She owed me money for all the hours I watched her child and dogs, but it wasn’t about the money. It was about feeling unseen. About realizing that my friendship … my time, my empathy … had become her convenience.

Still, I couldn’t stop loving her. I wanted so bad to have a sister/friend/neighbor all in one person.

When she finally decided to leave her husband, I was proud of her. I told her so. I clapped for her courage.

But I also watched her spiral … manic, impulsive, unmoored. She’d say she was healing, that she was just “living her life,” but I could see the cracks widening. The drinking, the late nights, the flirting with men, the constant need to escape herself. I wanted to help, but she never wanted help … only approval. If I gave no approval I was labeled judgmental and not worthy of friendship…

I’ve been that woman. The one who mistakes rebellion for freedom. The one who drinks to forget, who burns bridges just to feel the heat.

Maybe that’s why I stayed. Maybe I thought if I could care for her right, better than other friends she’s had and the husband she’s divorcing, if I could listen enough, she’d learn to love herself. Maybe I was trying to rewrite my own past through her … save her the way no one ever saved me.

But love doesn’t work that way.

Sometimes I imagine an alternate version of us … one where we’re both healed enough to be gentle. Where she comes over, and we sit outside smoking quietly, the air soft with music and laughter. Where we talk about our dreams and not just our damage. Where our dogs play in either of our backyards, our laughter blending with the smoke, music and hope, and neither of us feels like a burden.

I want that. I want a sisterhood kind of friendship. I want the friendship we almost had.

But I don’t know how to find it again.

Every time I think about her now, my chest fills with this strange ache … love and grief braided together. I miss her voice, her chaos, her energy. I miss the way her daughter’s tiny arms wrapped around my waist, the way she’d call my name like it was something safe. I was like family.

And yet, I can’t forget the silence… how every time I tried to open up, she’d drift away, scrolling, drinking more, drunk anger rising with complaints ruining the experience, disappearing. I can’t forget the feeling of being invisible in a friendship that was supposed to save us both.

I tell myself she’s just lost. That maybe she’ll come back someday when she’s ready to be real again. But deep down, I know some people never come back.

Still, I hope she does.

Because despite everything … the chaos, the hurt, the loneliness … I fucking love her.

Not the way people say I love you in passing, but the way I’ve learned to love everyone who’s ever been broken like me: fiercely, quietly, without guarantee.

I love her the way I wish someone had loved me when I was at my worst.

And maybe that’s the real truth … that love, even unreturned, still matters. That listening, even when it hurts, still means something. That I can miss her, be angry at her, and still want her to heal and be around as my neighbor/friend/sister… I don’t know if she’ll ever understand what she meant to me. But I know this though…. I know she taught me that even the most painful connections can still make us softer. That sometimes love doesn’t fix anything … it just teaches us how to survive without closing our hearts completely.

I still keep her number in my phone. I don’t text it anymore… I mean I did once but it was t about any of this… and she responded with a quick annoyed text back but I let it be and didn’t respond… But I look at our past texts sometimes, the way you look at a scar … proof that you once bled and somehow didn’t die.

And I whisper into the quiet, like a prayer I don’t expect answered…

I miss you.

I love you.

And I hope you find your way back to yourself.