My mind is in turmoil.

I have wondered for years if she was still alive. Her name is Mel too. We are opposites in every sense of the word. She is tall and I am short. She is blonde and I am brunette. She is hyper and I was always laid back. She was popular and I was not. She taught me how to dress, wear makeup, how to talk to boys, introduced me to heavy metal and taught me how to bang my head. We learned how to smoke cigarettes together. We babysat as a team. We once spent a whole weekend rewinding a tape and learning all the words to Bohemian Rhapsody. We double dated. She was my sister and we were inseparable. In fact, we married each others high school sweethearts in a surreal chain of events that no one saw coming.

We lost touch after I moved away but I was able to visit her twice when our vacations bought us back to Florida. The second time we visited her, her marriage was falling apart. Then I traveled to Central Florida just after my mother’s death, just to see her. Her mother called me out of the blue after 2 or 3 years of no contact. My immediate thought was that she was gone. The last I had talked to her she was babbling and incoherent. I remember sitting silently on the phone for what seemed like an hour and listened to her ramble without making discernable sentences, but not wanting to hang up because I was comforted at least that she was alive and as long as I had her on the phone with me she wasn’t going anywhere. Then I didn’t hear from her until her mother called.

I knew that she must have been high on something the night she called, so when her mother called me, with that sad tone in her voice and important news to tell me, my first thought was that she was dead. No, her mother said, not dead, merely overdosed and now living in a rehab. She warned me that the damage done by the drug was devastating to the brain and that she was now in a state of psychosis. Even living 9 hours away, I dropped my life and came running. I didn’t care the personal or financial hardship an emergency trip would cost me. We were talking about my sister, my best friend. I had to see her, hold her and know that she was still alive. When I arrived, she did not know me. Her mother had to introduce us, then after blaming her new “foggy” brain she was overjoyed to see me and spend time with me. I spent one hour with her after driving all night to get to her. She spent the whole hour telling me that she really wasn’t that sick and that really all she needed was for her mother and ex-husband to get off of her case. For that one hour, I was anything that she needed me to be…a person to vent to, an old friend who needed to have the “true” situation explained to her, and at one point, a stranger she was introducing herself to for the first time. In my heart I wept more and more. With every word she spoke, it was obvious that the friend I had spent countless hours laughing and sharing with was forever gone. She had been destroyed by the drug. Obliterated permanently by the damage left behind. We parted with promises to keep in touch. She told me that she planned to be home in the next month and restart her life…maybe even move to where I lived to start over. I held her close and smelled her hair, not knowing really if I would ever see her alive again.

I drove back to her mother’s house silently. I pretended a headache and went to lie down. What I really did was sit on the bed and cry while my husband held me and prayed. Her mother asked me later what was really wrong with me. She wanted to know what I wasn’t telling her. She needed me to talk to her like a nurse. Knowing that she needed to hear it, I explained that this person, this altered version, is permanent. This brain damage is unchangeable. This personality shift is probably the new her…forever. In reality she had died that night. The person that we knew was gone forever. I spoke with her twice more before she left the rehab. I didn’t even know she had gone. I called one evening to check on her and they said she had checked out. I didn’t find her again for almost a year. She called me at midnight on New Year’s. We spoke for 15 minutes. She told me she was in love with a man she met at AA and that she still wanted to move near me to start her life over again. I asked her how her children were…she changed the subject.

That was 5 years ago. I was able to find her cousin on Facebook and asked tenderly if she was still alive. I was told that the cousin didn’t have contact with her, but that yes she was alive. I miss her terribly. I think about her almost everyday and utter silent prayers that don’t even have a form other than “protect her”. Last night, after entering her name in the Facebook Search box (which I am in the habit of doing every so often but always finding nothing) suddenly there she was. Older, a little more rough around the edges, but alive and staring back at me from my computer screen. She is suddenly tangible and available….and I chickened out. I looked through her page, trying desperately to glean some insight into the person that she is now. It amounted to no less than stalking. I looked at posts, pictures, looked at the page of the man she is in a relationship with now, but I didn’t send her a message. I just…I don’t know…I’m scared. But then, that’s not exactly the right word. Worried may be a better word. By all appearances she is still that “other” person, the new person that I don’t know. I am faced with a dilemma that I never saw coming. Do I get to know this new person? It would seem that after searching methodically for her for years and even asking family members about her that I would be overjoyed to find her and would not be able to stop myself from contacting her immediately, but that is totally not what happened. My heart leapt when I saw her face, but then immediately in the place of joy came fear. Fear that I would hope for a relationship that cannot be. Fear that I would not love this new person and might even hate her for taking my best friend away from me.

I could tell from her Facebook posts that we have very little in common anymore. She appears to still be working out her demons while mine were faced long ago. We apparently lead completely different lives, with different directions or even morals. Do I let this person into my life, not knowing what pain will come of it? Do I welcome her knowing that I may have to walk away from her at some point? I cannot abide letting drama into my life for the sake of a friend I do not know anymore. Honestly, I am ashamed of myself. I searched for her. My heart pined for her. I have grieved the loss of her for years and now that she is right in front of me, I am frozen in fear. How can I ever have claimed to love her and not leap for joy at the sight of her? How can I say that I truly am a friend when I became a coward the moment I saw her? How can I be someone who is in school to be a professional counselor and feel judgmental towards my oldest and dearest friend for changing after a nearly deadly addiction?

I am ashamed and I should be. I lay in bed last night and prayed. I didn’t even tell Hubby that I found her or what I was going through. I just wanted time to process. As I lay there, I thought about my boys talking at the dinner table about the Mayan Apocalypse. We were discussing how no one really knows the hour and time that God will call us home. Then I thought about my oldest and dearest friend, who I almost lost and to some extent did lose to a drug. What if …. What if something does happen to her? What if I had the chance to hear her voice one more time and I chickened out? I have lived without my mother for 6 years now. What I wouldn’t do to have one more day with her. God is handing me another chance with Mel and I am letting the fear of the enemy keep me from her. It does not matter if she is different. I am different. I am different in so many ways than I was in high school. Different even, than I was the last time I saw her face. Being close to her might be painful, as I am reminded of the differences between then and now, but at least I have the chance to be close to her at all. I am going to take that chance. It might not end well, but I do not think I will regret trying.

This Message Brought to You by the Squashed and Tired:

So, I'm still doing the "errands and cleaning in the morning/work in the evening/homework in the wee hours" thing. It still sucks...I think that should go without saying. However, I think *hope* that by the end of the week I will have fabulous news. An office position has opened up in the Family Practice where I used to do relief work. It's part-time. Hubby and I have been yelling at each other, I mean "discussing", the possibility of my going part time for a couple months now. I have had more meltdowns, nervous breakdowns and need for alcohol in the last 6 months than I did when my children were small and not potty trained yet! Basically I had to explain the concept of "If Mama ain't happy..." to him. Ya'll know what I mean. So, after the office manager called me twice to see if I was interested in putting in my app, I finally bit the bullet and did it. Then, I had to tell my boss what I did. I sure wouldn't want her to hear about it in the morning meeting instead of from me. She took it well....actually I don't think she was upset at all. She wasn't an advocate for my position in the first place...so...yeah. So I had an interview last week and made myself available for peer interviews but was never called in for one. I called the office manager, just to check on the process, and was told that she had everything she needed and that after a dept. meeting this week that she would know further by the end of the week.

So now I wait.

It's a little nerve wracking though. I hate waiting.

Anyway, so ya'll pray for me. And, really put your backs into it because I don't think I will survive another year of 4-5 hrs of sleep a night. That's probably why kids eventually learn to sleep at night because if Mom's had to do the night shift thing for more than a year or so we probably would have collectively decided that Communist China had it right with the One Kid Rule, ya know what I'm sayin'?

I hope to be able to transistion to dayshift, no nights, no weekends, no holidays, and only working 3 days a week soon....REAL SOON.

Until then, I guess I'll just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimmmmmming....Thanks for the advice Dory :)

A Blog About Nothing

Normally writing comes so easily. I know what I'm going to write about ahead of time. At some point in my day a thought occurs to me or something funny or bizarre or inspirational happens to me and I think to myself "This is going in the blog". Tonight this isn't the case. I have no plan, I have no topic. I am a writer without a story. My day was bizarre enough alright but do I write about my house closing tomorrow or the drama that happened at work...or maybe the job opportunity that came my way today that would make me choose between two things that are precious to me? When you have a whirlwind of a day how do you choose? How do you single that one thing out and declare it as the most important or vexing thing in your life right now that it should grace the pages of your blog?? Being new to blogging, I don't know the answers to these questions. I know that my mind is racing 100 miles an hour. I know that any decision I make tonight could be the best decision ever or be one more time that I look back and feel like an impatient fool.I know that no matter what the topic, I have to write about it. So, unfortunately that leaves me right here. Writing about nothing...rambling on without even designating a subject. I suppose being overwhelmed is my topic. Being overwhelmed to the point of being paralyzed. How do I handle this feeling? How do I catagorize feeling excited but scared about the closing, frustrated to the point of tears over drama at work, anxious/confused/scared/fearful of the job opportunity, and just generally so worn and tired of the hoopla that I want to go to sleep like Rip Van Winkle and have my life pass me by without my intervention? There is no catagory for that...no place that I belong. I trust God. I believe that he will guide me and protect me. I know that if I trust him and seek his guidance that I am covered by him. So, why? Why is this feeling strangling me? Why do I feel the helplessness and futility even now? Because I doubt his omnipotence or wisdom? No. I have never doubted God. I think that I struggle with these things because in my pitiful human state I want control. I want control of these situations so badly that I would give myself an ulcer over it. I need to feel control over something. I ache for the feeling of control. But that's just it isn't it? A feeling. Its an illusion. There is no real control for us. God is in control. Why is that so hard for us? Is there something ingrained in us that needs us to repel God's control and guidance? Oh, silly me...yes there is - its called sin. The sin inside me wants to control my own life, like a toddler insisting "I can do it myself!". Well guess what? This toddler cannot "do it myself". I don't even want to imagine how many ways I would foul up things if someone left me in control. There have been a few times that I have elbowed my wants and needs to the front of the line - ahead of what God desires - and trust me...I don't want it again. That never worked out for me anyway. What I need right now is a good healthy dose of humility and patience. If I take my problems to Him and stop trying so pitifully to solve them myself maybe I can sleep tonight. Sleep sounds good. And, so does a hot bath. At least the water temperature is something that I can control.