(this is one of three blog posts about the situation that my dear friend has been going through–I have two others that have been in process for quite a while, and maybe this nablopomo stuff will encourage me to finally finish those too.)

It’s hard to believe that things can be change so quickly . . .

It was barely six months ago that we were looking ahead to a time when she was going to be free of the school/internship/work cycle . . . “imagine”, we would say. “You’ll have so much extra time that you won’t know what to do with yourself”, I often told her. This promise of relative freedom was something I pointed her towards to encourage her on particularly rough days. I always admired her in that she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what she wanted to do with her life; she had worked so, so hard for eight years, and now, a new stage of her life was about to begin. And she is good at what she does . . . intuitively good, in a way that can’t come from a classroom. She had–no, she HAS–her whole life ahead of her.

We talked about living arrangements. Wouldn’t it be nice, we speculated, if we shared an apartment, one that had an extra room for our mutual godbaby, as well as any of the other random kids who were around at different times. Sure, maybe it felt a tiny bit weird in a “playing house” kind of way, but it made total sense from a practical standpoint. I could keep him overnight anytime if I knew that I would have someone who could cover for me if I needed to run to the store for an hour . . . it would be fun, but more importantly, it would allow us to be on the same page in terms of his medical needs; it would allow us to be consistent.  And, although I would be there with my cluttery self, she would finally have a space to call her own, a place to live where she could spread out beyond one room.

There was just so much to look forward to . . . there was just so much energy behind my encouragements to her that things were going to get better. But I don’t think any of us could have seen what was to come next . . . I know that none of us could have imagined that one attack would turn into a “once-a-month” occurrence, or that there would be a flurry of useless court dates and unproductive ER visits and constant fear. I am certain that six months ago, nobody could see things ending this way, with her fleeing for her life.

It wasn’t supposed to go this way. And I’m waiting for things to turn right-side-up again . . . but realizing that, in so many ways, things will never be the same again.