I Still Check

There was no argument. That is what she has never been able to make anybody understand.

There was no falling out, no thing said, no moment anybody could point at. There was a Tuesday when a message went unanswered, which happens, and then a Friday, and then two weeks, and then the slow, extraordinary realization that a nine year friendship had simply been switched off from the other end with no announcement.

Nine years. They had lived together for two of them. They had a shared calendar. Her mother still asks after her.

That was two years ago.

She posts. That is the part. Weekly, sometimes more. Holidays, a new haircut, a job thing, a photograph of a dog that is not hers. Cheerful. Nothing wrong at all. And she is twenty-five and she checks, most days, first thing, and she has never once told a living soul that she checks.

And people say the thing. Her mother says a version of it. A woman who leads her group at church said it in October: you have to forgive her and move on, and honestly, you should reach out. Maybe she is going through something.

That last sentence is what has kept her at this for a year longer than she would otherwise have managed, and nobody has ever asked her what she is actually checking for.

Maybe you check something too. And you have been told to move on, and you have been handed a maybe, and nobody has asked what you have been waiting for it to say.

Sit down on the rug. That is exactly where this starts.

What the checking is actually for

Let me name it, because nobody has, and it cannot be put down while it has no name.

This was never a wait for an apology. It has been a wait for an acknowledgment.

An apology is about her. An acknowledgment is about the record: that there were nine years, that they were real, that you did not misread the whole thing, and that somebody who was there will say out loud that it happened and that ending it that way was a thing that was done rather than a thing that just occurred.

That is why the posts are unbearable in a way that silence alone would not be. Every post is a small announcement that the record is fine and nothing is outstanding. And a mind cannot close a loop while somebody keeps quietly signaling that there was never a loop.

You were not misreading nine years, and Psalm 33 says He fashions the hearts of them all and observes all their deeds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you unable to accept a photograph of somebody else's dog as a settlement.

It is not coming, and the maybe is not a kindness

Now the hard part, plainly, because the gentle version has cost you an extra year.

It is not coming. Not this month, not when she has a hard year of her own, not at a wedding in five years, not in a long message at two in the morning that begins with the words I have been thinking about you.

And I need to deal with the maybe, because it was handed to you in October by somebody who meant well and it has done more damage than the silence did. Maybe she is going through something. Nobody knows that. It is a sentence people say to make a hard conversation end, and its actual effect on you was another twelve months of checking.

Here is the half nobody says: a message that never arrives does not make the nine years unreal, and it does not settle the matter in her favor. Cheerfulness is not a correction. A thing that goes unacknowledged has not thereby been agreed to by anybody.

You are not waiting on the last word about this, and Psalm 33 says He observes all their deeds from where He sits, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a person where a record is actually kept.

Where the acknowledgment already is

Here is the turn, and it is not a smaller thing handed over in place of a bigger one.

The acknowledgment exists. It has existed since the Tuesday, and it was never in her keeping, because she was never in a position to give it properly.

God was in the two years you lived together and in the shared calendar and in the Tuesday. He was not told about it later. He does not hold a version assembled from posts, and there is not one week of those nine years that He has quietly reclassified as something you exaggerated.

And one thing before the verse, because somebody joined this to something it is not joined to. Releasing her is not reconciling with her, and it is not trusting her, and nothing here asks you to reach out, or comment, or be in a room with her ever again. You are free to finish the whole of this by yourself on a rug, and it is written that so far as it depends on you, you live peaceably with all, which is a phrase with a limit built into it, and the Holy Spirit is what steadies a person doing this alone.

Look to the right and see: there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me; no one cares for my soul. I cry to You, O Lord; I say, You are my refuge.Psalm 142:4-5

You have a psalm that says the first half out loud without being told to look on the bright side, and Psalm 142 is where it is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put a sentence that raw in a book people sing from. Nobody edited that man's account of who did not show up. And then, in the very next line, without contradicting a word of it, there is a refuge.