Seven Years Later, I Went Back for Her ~

I have been thinking about a woman lately.
I haven't seen her in seven years.
It is August 2019, and she has just moved into an apartment. She is putting furniture together, trying to make the unfamiliar space feel like a home. One weekend, she is building a desk for her office.
She is also trying to build a life.
She doesn't know how she is going to do it.
She doesn't know what the next few months will bring, much less the next seven years. She is carrying wounds of abandonment and rejection she doesn't yet fully understand. And when someone from the life she is trying to leave reaches back toward her with what seems like an emergency, she opens the door just a crack.
He gets in.
For the next month, she will lose herself again.
For a long time, I looked back at that period through the lens of what happened to me. What he did. What I allowed. What I should have recognized. The red flags. The manipulation. The crumbs I picked up because, at the time, crumbs could still feel like love.
But something different came to me recently.
I don't want to analyze her anymore.
I want to be her friend.
And so I began imagining something that feels a little like time travel.
What if August 2019 is still happening for her?
What if she is still there in that apartment, building that desk, scared and uncertain and trying to convince herself that she is going to be okay?
And what if I could go back to her from seven years in the future?
Not to warn her or to stop her from making the choices she is about to make.
What if I could simply sit beside her as her inner mentor?
I think I would bring her here.
I would take her for a walk. I would bring her home and let her sit on my deck. I would make her some tea, and we wouldn't have to talk about anything she wasn't ready to talk about.
I would let her experience the quiet.
I would let her feel what safety feels like.
I would let her see the life she cannot possibly imagine from where she is sitting in August 2019.
And eventually, I think I would tell her:
You don't know me yet.
But I am you.
Seven years from now, you will live a peaceful life.
You will learn that safety isn't something another person gives you by choosing you. You will stop negotiating your worth through other people's attention, approval, presence, or absence.
You will discover that the abandonment you fear most isn't someone else leaving you.
It is leaving yourself.
And you will learn how to stay.
You will walk thousands of miles, some across another country, many within yourself. You will write. You will tell the truth about your life. You will meet versions of yourself you haven't met yet, and slowly, you will stop asking the world to tell you who you are.
Most importantly, you will find your way to a place inside yourself where God has been waiting all along.
I wish I could tell her that she won't get hooked again after that August weekend.
But she will.
I wish I could tell her that once she moves into that apartment, the hardest part will be over.
It won't be.
She still has to live through things because knowing something intellectually and knowing it in her bones are entirely different.
She doesn't yet know how not to abandon herself.
But I do.
That's why I have been thinking about her now.
Healing sometimes moves backward through time.
We spend so much of our lives imagining our future selves. We ask what our lives might look like five years from now. We set goals. We make plans. We visualize the person we want to become.
But lately I have been wondering about the opposite.
What if the person we have become could go back?
What would she say?
What if the woman sitting in that apartment in August 2019 could somehow sense me sitting here in August 2026?
What if, in one of her most frightened moments, something inside her whispered:
Just keep going. You have no idea who you become.
Maybe that voice was hope.
Maybe it was God.
Or maybe, somehow, it was me.
Seven years later, coming back for her.
Because she deserves to know I never forgot her, and this time, I won’t abandon her.

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