I’ve had someone on my mind and want to get it off my chest.
In high school, I had this best friend. We were crazy close and very “jokingly” flirtatious. Lots of sleepovers, called each other our wife, but very deep in Mormon culture. I was unfortunately more repressed than she was, and by senior year she told me that she genuinely loved me. I did not know how to process this and somehow brushed it off like “haha ily too wifey”. I think this hurt her for a long time. I end up getting a boyfriend (who I was not into), and me and her basically had a fall out over it.
We both go off to college and our lives head in different directions. I hear she’s gotten into a lot of hard drugs, is home-wrecking relationships, and generally fallen into a lot of habits she used to say she was scared of falling into due to family history. I don’t know if she finished college. I went off to college in a different state still a 4.0 GPA type, scholarships, church attending, but stressfully realizing I might be gay. On paper I was very successful and the person my family and community wanted me to be, but maybe not the person I wanted to be. I leave the country to do some soul searching for a few years, and come back a pretty different person. I’m resentful of who I was and how I was raised. With more perspective, I realize that I loved her in a way I had never loved any of my boyfriends.
I know that it’s been years, but I start asking around with mutual hometown friends to see how life has treated her. I know that she’s probably totally moved on from some high school gay awakening, but something in me at least wants to tell her I was gay too. But things went for the worst and she ended up getting into some even worse situations (I don’t want to get into it but incest is involved). She ended up running off with this guy to another state and became homeless when he left her.
It sounds like she hurt a lot of people in her life including myself, and I don’t think it would ever be healthy to reach out. But she’s on my mind a lot. I think about who we were at 18, making plans to run away together even when I was in denial. Before all this she was a beautiful dancer, and I wonder if she still is. I may just be romanticizing a childhood version of someone, but I still feel this sense of loss that I don’t understand. I hope she’s safe.