What I’ve been wondering is, when God told you to stop being my friend, was it in the still small voice or the fun Old Testament theatrics?

Was it in the gentle breeze, like the ones we hoped for on your back patio in the stifling late July Michigan summers, where your wild mint and our laughter, both, could not be tamed? Or was it on a gale of wind like the ones that blew out the power lines that one night? Tornado sirens wailing, the sky yellow, and you and I leading our entire families– dogs and all– across the street to your neighbor’s house, where we let ourselves in the basement door and piled on the floor. Your daughter was just a baby then. We sang hymns to make us less afraid.

We were always singing hymns, because you need them and I love them and I always loved to find the things that made us the same. I can see, now, the discomfort it gave you– that while I always sang them from the heart, I did not sing them for my salvation. Which put me in the Gray. Where everything else could be Black and White to you, my love for you and my love of hymns and my love even of god was unsettlingly in a non-category, fuzzed out Gray like an option you can’t click on your computer screen. Was that what made God tell you that you couldn’t be my friend? That made him come down from the throne on the most high to tap your shoulder and let you know that there was no one else that could be sent, that he had to do this himself, that you must be told by him directly and with no uncertainty that I needed to be cast out? It would make sense. I am unmanageable in the ways of Yes or No and Black or White and Anything or Anything. I am faithful but unruly. Loyal but ungroomed. Lovable but feral. Yours but not yours.

So tell me, please– how did he say it?

Were you sitting quietly in the back of a bus when he walked on, plopping into the seat beside you, catty and gossipy and eyes rolling and laughing and saying “When she gets on the bus, let’s not make room for her! Let’s make her sit up there with all of the sinners and the gays and the Catholics!”

It had more tact than that, I hope. You have more tact than that, I can’t imagine you’d let him get away with it.

Was it like Samuel being beckoned by the actual voice of God? Did you feel confused at first, thinking it was your son calling you in the middle of the night? Did you go to check on him and find him still asleep, and then go out to the night sky– the wide starry kind we first met under on an island in New England over sixteen years ago? And did you say “Yes Lord.” And he told you, right there, in the dark with his own voice?

Or maybe it was less conventional. Maybe it was a modern miracle of my face on the body of the Virgin Mary charred with precision on your bread as it popped up from the toaster in your kitchen. The same kitchen we spent our nights talking about our periods and our music and our strange, rattled history of remaining friends in the most unlikely circumstances. The same kitchen you told me that my parents treated me like an enemy. The same kitchen I told you that your husband treated you as a slave. The same kitchen we both said, “I know, I know, I know” and we cried and conceded that the other was right. And when I returned to my mother, and you stayed with the man who keeps you, neither one of us turned the other out in judgment. Instead, we put on the kettle for tea. These moments, these forgivenesses lost for the Lord speaking on a burnt piece of toast.

Maybe it was the writing on the wall, like in the book of Daniel, a hand simply appeared on your bedroom wall, and like he wrote to King Belshazzar that his kingdom was soon over, so he wrote you that our friendship was done. Right there, on the same bedroom walls I painted for you those few summers ago, right after your youngest was born and you were in the deepest dark of your postpartum and those damn dark blue walls that once held you in a cocoon now suffocated you. So we went to the hardware store and I helped you pick a color and for a day and half my Someone and I changed that dark, horrible room into a bright sea green so that you could breathe again as you breastfed in your room, even as you worried over every breath of your tiniest one. Not once, but twice did you feel they weren’t yet bright enough, you still felt the darkness leaking through, and I didn’t care that it was already covered; I only cared that you were so so sad and I would paint for five more days and go through ten more gallons until we left if it meant that this paint would help you not feel so so sad anymore.

Or maybe it was like Jesus himself– a real pro move– in the Garden, praying for this cup to be taken from him, that this burden might be given to someone else. Right there, in the St. Francis garden at the convent next door to your house, the same garden I took all those walks with you since you moved there more than a decade ago, as your oldest boy grew up and grew rambunctious and we’d let him run while we trailed behind with my dogs leashed. In the same garden I took your family photos that year, where you all glowed like an angelic, perfect family. Maybe it was there, and you were taking your daily walk, the one time of day you have to yourself without tiny fingers crawling on your body and little voices screaming into your ears, and you dug your knees into the earth and begged that the Lord let us remain friends. And just like in the Jesus of Nazareth movie, a light shone down and you knew we were done for.

Which I guess reminds me– did you bargain to keep me? In any of these scenarios, did you beg for a ram to miraculously appear instead? Or even just ask for another friend– a friend that didn’t share so much history, so much care, so much love for you to be taken instead? Because God will do that, you know. Even the crazy Old Testament one. I think if you ask, he’ll notice you’ve been devout enough to let you slay a lamb chop for dinner instead of me.

Maybe I know that every word I write is another piece of shrapnel that surely will tear through the imaginary thread of a chance we have to go back, to ignore your direct orders from God; and yet I cannot help but go forward, believing the truth will set us free. And I wonder, there, if that is how you feel, too, but even more greatly so, as someone who has the real and actual voice of God on their side against me who just has the truth of years and of loving you. It’s a flimsy fight, even I can see that.

So how did he say it? How exactly did God tell you to stop being my friend?

Because over here? I’ve been listening, too, and all she said about you was “Love, love, love her.”