Worried about friend...

Lobelia Overhill

This is more likely to be an incoherent ramble than anything else...

anyhoos a few years ago I'd a friend, I know a few people didn't like her [but when pressed wouldn't say why just some vague "oh you know ..."], but I got on grand with her, she was very funny, well read, travelled etc, didn't make me feel like an eejit cos I'm not as well read/travelled as she was. She'd a large number of assorted dogs and cats that she'd picked up along the way and was like one of them eccentric old women you hear about who end up with their face eaten off by their cats - which was something we used to joke about (and her husband was mortified about!). We made "plans" to be the Crazy Old Cat ladies and live in a house with hundreds of cats and dogs and a couple of old ponies in the orchard, with her husband as our mad butler, and had many a good laugh about it all.

Then one day she moved away. I knew she was selling her house, but I'd been led to believe she was buying another one with more land a few miles further away. Instead she sold up and left "in the middle of the night", she pushed a note saying "by the time you read this I'll be long gone" through my door with no details of where she was going or why.

I eventually found out she'd been drinking really heavily and made enemies of some settled Travellers who lived near her (constantly reporting them to the Gards etc) and had gone paranoid that someone was out to get her, so she'd left, having fooled people into thinking she was moving a few miles down the road ...

She did eventually email me and we got to chatting online, she still wouldn't tell me where she was and begged me not to tell anyone else that she was in contact with me in case her "enemies" found her.

We were emailing back and forth every day for weeks, she got a new job, stopped drinking and sobered up, she started talking about the cats, dogs, ponies and setting up an animal shelter or something similar and having me come help her run it ...

Then she decided to leave her husband, because he now bored her, and she met a new man through her job. I didn't like the sound of her new man - he reminded me of a fella another friend used to date, he turned out to be a "wife beater". She ignored my concerns (which I only expressed when she finally paused for breath long enough to ask me what I thought) and kept on and on and on about him - as someone else said "who's she trying to convince [that he's The Most Wonderful Man On Earth], you or her?"
She never went down the "you're just jealous" route that these conversations usually go, just kept going on about him. I made a half hearted attempt at telling her she was on a high after coming off the drink and needed to take things a bit slower, but she bulldozed on ...

I haven't heard from her in at least 6 months and I'm worried about her, partly because I've convinced myself her new man is a wife beater, partly because her husband (no, they're not divorced) might have done something, and mostly because I miss my friend ... I miss the laughs we used to have, I miss having to pick a cat off the sofa so I could sit down, only to have a dog jump on me, I miss having to push a dog out of my car so I could go home of an evening. I even miss her grumpy husband (who used to cuddle the dogs when he thought no one was looking!). We were kindred spirits having both survived dysfunctional childhoods and toxic parents without having to go into therapy or be on meds.

I don't know if I should email her and ask after her, or leave it ... I'm hoping she stopped emailing because I was being too negative about her new man and not for any other reason, but if she did then she's not going to reply to any email I send.

starchild

hi just email her tell her you miss her and hopefully you get a reply