I’ve Missed You 9 comments

By Jessica Mesman Griffith

I spent the day panicking about deadlines and work past due. I sat staring at my blank computer screen, willing words to appear, when the message indicator pinged. It was an email from a childhood friend.

Shelly was a strange child, by the neighborhood standards. She was quiet, arty, obsessively neat. She was blind in one eye and wore enormous glasses.

My sister and her friends would have been more natural playmates for her. Shelly was their age, four years older, but for whatever reason she preferred my company. Even at that young age we had a strong bond. I loved her strangeness. I also loved that she loved me, preferred me to all the others.

We grew up on the same street, but only until I was seven. After she moved I spent many afternoons on our front porch, staring longingly at her house at the end of the street. Even at seven years old, I could conjure melancholy. My mom would roll her eyes. “Don’t bother,” she’d tell my sister when he tried to lure me into some game. “She’s having a Shelly-attack.”

She’d only moved 30 minutes away, but that seemed like an impossible distance when I was a child. We stayed close with regular letters and occasional visits, always from her. I never spent a night away from home if I could help it. I hated being away from my house and my family.

Her visits were always unexpected. Every so often, we’d hear a knock at the door, and there she’d be, suitcase in hand, parents already driving away and leaving her behind. She never called first. We never knew how long she’d stay. She was like something out of a fairy tale, like Mary Poppins blowing in on the breeze. She’d simply materialize and then disappear again after a few days. She didn’t seem to have a life of her own, a family of her own.

I don’t know that I ever even asked her much about her life. I couldn’t have been a very good friend. I was so young. Just as I never went to her house, never saw her room or her parents, I never imagined her existence beyond her relationship to me.

Months and then years passed. I’d forget her for a while, until a letter arrived. She was a naturally good and stylish writer. Even now when she writes to me I see her mirroring some of my own stylistic preferences back at me. I learned to write by writing her letters. I must have unconsciously imitated her all my life.

We finally lost touch when I went to college. When I left Louisiana for grad school in my early twenties, I couldn’t bear to look back for fear that I’d be on the first plane home. I cut a lot of ties that I’m only beginning to mend. I haven’t seen her in at least ten years.

But the pattern continues. After a few years of silence and forgetfulness, she always tracks me down, makes a call, sends a message, or shows up on my dad’s doorstep during a visit home, and I always feel guilty, busted, found out in my double life. When I see her return address, my heart jumps like I’ve seen a ghost.

She’ll deflect every apology for losing touch. “I’ve missed you,” she’ll say, and go on as if not a day has passed, as if we’re still as close as we were at seven and eleven.

In some ways we are the same, and I’m ashamed that I’m no better a friend than I was back then. I still hate to travel. I can’t stand to be away from my family. I forget to call and write until so much time has passed it seems impossible and embarrassing to catch up.

I’ve been reading about St. Francis and St. Clare lately, and thinking about their friendship as a way that Christ makes himself present to us. I wonder what my own friendships reveal—especially my friendship with Shelly. I think of the quiet way she shaped my life’s work, and the mysterious consistency of her love, despite my negligence. I wonder why I can’t bring myself to reform and become the friend she deserves.

I hide, but she always finds me.