The Friends Who Knew the Earlier Versions
They know the house you live in now. The long-term marriage that feels like home. The way you take your tea. The fact that you write. The fact that you have opinions about sentence rhythm, bad behaviour, and people who say “it is what it is” as if that counts as philosophy.
They know the woman with grown children, or nearly grown children. The woman who has survived enough to stop explaining every bruise on the inside. The woman who has made a life in Scotland, by the sea, with a good man and a dogged determination to tell the truth in complete sentences.
Then there are the other friends.
The ones who knew you before you had language for any of it.
The ones who knew the girl in the short platinum pixie cut, all legs and cheekbones and nerve. The girl who was 5’9”, thin, pretty in a way that made people look twice and sometimes behave badly. Men stopped. Some women probably did too. I knew I looked different. Not better. Different. I leaned exotic, whatever that means when people say it to a young woman as if she should be grateful for being looked at like a destination.
I had modelled. I hated it. So I waited tables instead. I loved that.
That probably tells you most of what you need to know about me.
I did not want to stand still and be arranged. I would rather carry plates, dodge hands, remember orders, flirt for tips if necessary, keep moving, keep earning, keep myself useful. There is dignity in work, but there is also escape in it. You can disappear into motion. You can be too busy for anyone to ask what hurts.
Back then, we were young and silly and sometimes dangerous. Not in the glamorous way people like to pretend later. Dangerous in the actual way. We made poor choices with confidence. We drove when we should not have. We loved men who had no business being loved by anyone yet. We stayed out too late. We drank things that tasted like poor judgment and fruit syrup. We trusted the wrong rooms. We laughed too loudly. We mistook risk for freedom, which is a common mistake when you are young and nobody has taught you the bill always arrives.
I was a young single mother inside all that.
That part matters.
I could be wild, but only in sections. I always had children to get back to. I had bottles, school mornings, fevers, rent, groceries, laundry, some small person needing shoes, cereal, medicine, a ride, a lap, a mother who could still stand upright after whatever the night before had taken from her.
My friends showed up to party. They also showed up because I had a home.
That was the arrangement, though none of us would have called it that. I had children, so I had structure. Not always money. Not always peace. But structure. A fridge. A couch. A place to land. I offered refuge, which is a lovely word until you realise refuge often means everyone else gets to collapse and you get to find clean towels.
I was the one they called.
In trouble. In need. In chaos. Pregnant scares. Man trouble. Money trouble. Family trouble. Emotional trouble. The kind of trouble that arrives at midnight and does not respect whether you have to be up at six.
I had answers, or I pretended to.
Sometimes pretending is all adulthood is, especially when you become one before your time.
I knew how to call the shots because somebody had to. I knew which panic needed action and which panic needed tea. I knew when to tell someone to come over and when to tell them to go home. I knew how to sound calm while privately wondering how the hell I had become the responsible one.
I think some of them kept me included because they loved me. I think some of them kept me included because I was useful.
Both can be true.
This is one of the things age teaches you, if you let it. People can love you and still use the version of you that serves them best. They can adore your strength and still help themselves to it until you are standing there with nothing left but the reputation for being strong.
I was probably not always the first call because I had kids. I could not always go. I was tied to real life in a way some of them were not yet. But I was often the call when things went wrong.
I was the pretty girl with the couch. The one with lipstick and children. The one who could pour a drink, make a meal out of nothing, tell you the truth, find the number, hold the baby, hide the evidence, call the cab, smooth the room, make the plan.
A lot of life happens inside friendships like that.
Not neat life. Not brunch life. Not matching-jumper holiday-card life. Real life. The kind where you see each other too drunk and too heartbroken and too hopeful and too stupid. The kind where you know who took what, who slept where, who cried in the bathroom, who lied to the man, who lied to herself, who said she was fine when she had mascara down her neck and one shoe missing.
Those friends knew versions of me that no longer exist in public.
I do not wear my hair like Twiggy anymore. I do not have the body I had then. I do not enter rooms with the same kind of charge. I do not need to be seen in that old way, and I do not miss what came with it. Beauty is not free. People act like it is a gift, and in some ways it is, but it also creates a job you never applied for. You become responsible for other people’s reactions. Their envy. Their wanting. Their assumptions. Their little punishments when you do not perform correctly.
I have been the pretty girl, the single mother, the one who worked too many shifts, the one who knew what to do. I have been the one who waited tables instead of being looked at for a living. I have been the one who gathered people in and sent them back out patched up enough to continue.
Then life moved.
Marriage, maybe. More children for me. Different states. Different countries. Safer choices, eventually. A good and loving marriage. A life twenty-plus years away from that earlier version of myself, though not separate from her. She is still in here. I can feel her when I am tired. I can feel her when I am angry. I can feel her when someone assumes I became sensible because I ran out of fire.
No.
I became selective.
There is a difference.
Friendships from those early years do not always end. Sometimes they go dormant. That is the strange part. They do not break dramatically. Nobody slams a door. Nobody makes a speech. They simply recede. You miss a call, then they miss one. Someone moves. Someone marries badly. Someone stops drinking. Someone starts again. Someone’s mother gets sick. Someone’s kid needs help. Someone disappears into a relationship, or a diagnosis, or a job, or shame, or debt, or exhaustion.
Then ten years pass.
Then twenty.
And somehow you still think of them as yours.
This is the part I did not understand when I was younger. Dormant does not mean gone.
I had a good friend I lost in August of 2025.
I did not know until May of 2026.
That sentence is still hard to write.
For months, I had sent texts. Emails. Little reaching-out messages into the silence. I knew she had been caring for her mother, Dollie, who had dementia. I knew she was overwhelmed. I knew she wanted out. Not out of love, but out of the brutal daily grind of watching a parent disappear while still breathing. She had dreams. Portugal. Spain. A different life. A warmer one. A freer one. We had talked about meeting there one day, when Dollie had been put to rest and my friend could finally turn toward herself.
That was the plan.
Plans are rude like that. They stand around acting solid.
When she did not answer, I worried. Then I got irritated. Then I worried again. That is the pattern with people you love who go quiet. You try not to make it about you. Then you do. Then you scold yourself. Then you send another message.
Finally, I Googled.
There she was.
Gone.