For over a year, we trade emails and texts. Several times a day. Sometimes twice, some times fifteen times or more. She tells me about how scared she is in her relationship, that her boyfriend is passive-aggressive emotionally abusive. He would never raise a hand to her, but he'd shame her for not loading a dishwasher the way he likes it.
I help as best I can, but tell her theres nothing anyone can do unless she leaves him on her own.
We talk on Skype. Sometimes we talk on the phone. She's the first woman, the only woman to ever use the exact words I've wanted to hear without my goading or leading her to them. She says "I love you" with all the same intensity as a love struck teenager and all the wisdom of someone who has hurt their entire life.
She tells me secrets no one else knows. She tells me about how all her friends disapprove of her boyfriend and how she thinks it won't last. That all my advice is matching up with what everyone else has said already and that she should leave. She goes as far as trying to figure out how'd she move back down here or I up there, balancing out where to live and affordability and her dog.
I'm now carrying the weight and responsibility of a relationship I am not in, so some other asshole can tread water a little longer while the ship sinks. I see this and don't care, I just want her to call me again and again and again after that.
I pick up the phone to call her and she's on the other end without my dialing or the phone ringing. Or she's sitting at her computer at 2 am wondering what I'm doing and an email from me pops up right then, asking her what she's up to. A close friend dies and I call her for comfort; the cat she had since middle school died hours before. A billion tiny moments like this. Too many to count. All supernatural in feeling, all unexplainable to logic. It scares her but she's intrigued, I just revel in it as a sign that everything would work out.
And it did for a while.
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