The Version of Me They Kept

This summer I decided not to make the first move.

I didn't message him.

I didn't ask if he wanted to get the kids together.

I didn't suggest a day out or send one of those little messages that keeps a relationship ticking over.

I just left the summer blank.

And the summer stayed blank.

Nothing came back.

That has been difficult to sit with because he isn't simply an old friend I've drifted away from.

He was my friend's husband.

And she died.

There are relationships that exist because two people independently chose each other, and then there are relationships that grow around somebody you both love. Families overlap. Children become friends. Lives become knitted together. You stop thinking about who originally connected whom because eventually everyone just seems to belong there.

Then the person in the middle disappears.

And I think I am only now beginning to understand what can happen to all those threads afterwards.

Recently I was talking to a mutual friend who shares the same faith as him, about the distance that now seems to exist between us. She said, quite matter-of-factly, that she could understand it. That she thought I was probably seen as unusual — not dangerous, not bad, just someone whose life looked different enough that keeping distance might feel, to him, like the responsible thing to do around children.

I want to be careful here, because this was her reading of the situation, not a fact anyone had confirmed. I don't actually know what he thinks. There are other explanations for silence. Grief changes people. Families contract after loss. Relationships that once seemed permanent can turn out to have been held together by the person who died. Maybe she was the bridge between us and I didn't realise quite how much of the bridge was her. I can't know unless he tells me.

But her comment still landed somewhere tender. Because suddenly I felt as though everything I had ever been to my friend and her family had been condensed into a handful of bullet points.

Former sex therapist. Interested in alternative therapies. Interested in plant medicine. A bit witchy. Home educates her children. Believes there is more to the world than the things we can easily see and measure. Interested in ideas around frequency. Open about relationships, bodies and intimacy.

Unusual.

And that was apparently the version of me left standing.

I came away thinking: is that really what remains of me? Because I don't experience myself as particularly outrageous. I'm not walking into people's houses trying to convert them to anything. I'm not loud or deliberately provocative. I'm not inappropriate with people. I don't require everyone sitting around my table to believe the same things I do.

I have simply made some choices that sit outside the usual ones. I chose to home educate my children. I am fascinated by plants and their medicinal properties. I am interested in alternative approaches to wellbeing. I have explored ideas about energy and frequency. I trained in work involving sex and relationships and I am comfortable talking openly about healthy intimacy.

Some of my interests are evidence-based. Some are beliefs. Some are things I am simply curious about. I don't expect everyone else to agree with all of them. In fact, I'd be slightly horrified if everybody I knew thought exactly the same way I did.

What struck me after that conversation was that I have never considered difference an especially good reason not to like somebody. I don't believe in the same things they do. But I can sit beside somebody who does. Their faith does not have to become my faith for me to think they are kind. Or funny. Or interesting. Or somebody I would happily have a cup of tea with. We don't have to believe the same things to think each other good people.

Perhaps that is why this has hurt so much. Not because somebody might disagree with me. People disagree with me all the time. It is the possibility that disagreement might have become more important than character. That somebody could look at the whole complicated collection of things that make up a person and pull out only the parts they find difficult. And then let those parts stand for everything.

I keep thinking about my friend. Because she knew the whole version of me. She knew the things I believed. She knew the things I had done. She knew my odd interests and my strong opinions and whatever else came bundled up with being my friend. But she also knew how I behaved. She knew whether I turned up. Whether I cared. Whether I helped. Whether I loved her children. Whether I was somebody she trusted.

And perhaps that is the particular vulnerability of losing someone who knew you well. They take their version of you with them. The complete one. The one containing all the contradictions. Other people are left holding fragments. And you don't get much say in which fragments they keep.

Maybe that is what frightened me most about that conversation. I could probably cope with being forgotten more easily than I could cope with being remembered selectively. To have all the ordinary evidence of who I was somehow disappear behind the things that made me different.

But her comment — even taken as only one guess among several possible ones — still made me confront something I hadn't really thought about before. How much of ourselves should we change to remain acceptable to somebody else?

Because suppose it's true. What would I actually do with that? I could stop talking about certain things. I could hide pieces of myself. I could make myself more conventional. Less curious. Less open. Less witchy. Less me. Perhaps then I would fit more comfortably inside somebody else's boundaries.

But they wouldn't really be accepting me. They would be accepting the edited version.

And equally, if somebody else's beliefs genuinely tell them that distance from me is the right thing for their family, I can't ask them to pretend otherwise just so that I don't feel rejected. They would be editing themselves too.

There is something terribly unsatisfying about that conclusion because nobody gets to be wrong enough for me to feel properly angry. Sometimes two people can simply understand the world differently enough that a space opens between them. You can respect somebody's right to stand on the other side of that space. And still wish they hadn't. You can understand that people are allowed to choose who belongs in their lives. And still feel dejected when you're not chosen. You can refuse to change yourself. And still wish being yourself hadn't cost you something.

Perhaps that is the part of tolerance we don't talk about very often. We talk about coexistence as though understanding difference makes difference painless. It doesn't. Sometimes understanding exactly why somebody might choose differently just leaves you with fewer people to blame.

The summer is still blank. I haven't filled it. And perhaps eventually I will understand what the silence means.

For now, I keep coming back to something much smaller.

My friend knew the whole version of me.

I'm glad she did.

Because whatever fragments of me other people choose to keep, somewhere in the life we had together there was a person who knew all of it and chose to be my friend anyway.