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I had this friend once...

   She had fire engine red hair, and the moment my mother laid eyes on her she knew we would be friends. We were, for a long time. But, she was mess. She was a complete fucked up mess and when we stopped talking after 9 years of friendship she was still a mess. In the beginning, the way she was made sense. She came from a completely broken family full of mistrust, abandonment, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and every other messed up thing that could happen to a person.
    It would be a long hard road for her, but I never stopped standing by her side. Although 6 years older than me, she and I became like sisters. We never lacked of intimate conversation or want of trust. We were polar opposites, but we got along very well.
    And, to this day, I still don't know why we stopped talking. She had this problem with family and friends, and when they would not call her up and ask about her life and instead dump on her their own problems...she would slowly dump each person she had. She became a lonely girl who had no family. I can't say I didn't blame her, but her standards were very high, and broken people usually can't live up to high standards. Most of the time she couldn't live up to her own.
    I watched her ditch recreational drugs, dabble in mysticism, break free of abuse, find God, find strong and healthy friends, fall into depression, get buried in debt, find her identity, lose herself again, lose God, move to find peace, date boy after messed up boy, find herself, pick up the recreational drug use, lose herself, slowly try to pick herself up...and then she walked. Away. The last time I heard from her was a call at 4 in the morning a year ago. Those calls were never good.
    Often she would call late in the night either drunk or high and completely broken. Many nights I would stay up late and listen to her cry. I would feel bad that I couldn't help. The story was the same...it was either her family or her boyfriend and they had given her the illusion that they wanted to mend the relationship that was broken, the relationship that always started out broken, and she would fall for it...again and again and again. I was there for it all.
   It got old. It got so old that I couldn't pick up the tiny fragmented pieces any longer. I had picked them up so often and tried to glue them back that they were no longer pieces of her, they were sand, and they kept slipping through my fingers. I was no mender. I was no god. I was not God. Perhaps she realized that I was no help. Perhaps she realized that the life I was being drained of into her wasn't staying any longer...it was just going in and leaving having nothing to cling to.
    But, I miss her sometimes. I miss her a lot. And, I don't know if it is worth reaching out to see if the mosaic of her life has been recreated. I fear that it might cause more damage. I fear that my desire to inquire into her life might tip over the edge a broken girl who has been teetering for many years. But, my fears may be completely unfounded. She may be whole, and there is a part of me that wants to find out. Do I risk it?

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