It’s 2 am and my friend Lessie is scrubbing the hand railing going up the stairs in the tiny rental house I’m moving out of tomorrow. She’s been blasting Ani DiFranco for hours, but we’ve been at it for a while and getting tired now (maybe also from the wine and brownies we started the cleaning session out with). She is my only girlfriend, after I divorced my husband and left my tight-knit church community, my entire network of family and friends crumbling around me.

She is also an Ex-Mormon and we were introduced by a mutual acquaintance. We went to have hot cocoa and sat in a sticky booth for four hours talking about our experiences. But we moved on pretty quickly from Mormonism and our friendship became much more.

When my van broke down the morning I had a job interview three hours away, she jumped in the car and came over to let me borrow hers. I started crying sitting in the car because I was so nervous and totally blanked on how to use her stick shift. She took one look at me completely melting down in front of her and just said, I’ll drive you. I was like, what? crying harder but because of gratitude now. We threw the kids in the car to drop them off at pre-school (of course we had to stop at the grocery store that morning to buy muffins for some dumb class party first) and peeled into the parking lot of my (hopefully) new employer hours later. In my mind, there are tire tracks, the smell of burnt rubber, and me spilling out of the passenger side sweaty and disheveled. It wasn’t exactly like the Fast and the Furious, but you know, pretty close.

What is true is that we got there with only minutes to spare. The interview went well and I was offered the job on the spot. Getting that position was instrumental for me in moving forward with my life beyond just making money. A lot of my life was riding on it at that point and Lessie was there for me when I needed her most. That was years ago, and we both moved away from that place we met and in opposite directions, both starting new lives. We didn’t keep in touch.

I’m bad at making friends and I’m bad at maintaining friendships. I was a weird kid and a very unpopular teenager, so my expectation is still that people will somehow know I’m not one of them, I don’t belong, that I’m strange. And then I psych myself out to the point where I actually do and say very awkward shit.

A few years ago I had started thinking about making new friends in my new town. It was Christmas Eve and I was at Target for last-minute shopping (of course). A short, red-haired woman and I reached for the same kids’ Polaroid camera — the last one! Instead of fighting each other to the death over it, we laughed and struck up a conversation. What a meet-cute, people!! Why can’t there be meet-cutes for new best friends? Anyway, this was just a friendly interaction. Aside from loving Target and being Christmas procrastinators, we had nothing in common, but I thought that was enough. Cringing at my own words as they came out of my mouth I told her I hadn’t made any new friends here yet, and if she wanted to get a cup of coffee after the holidays. She said yes and we exchanged phone numbers. Yes, I know she gave me her real one because we test texted each other in the Target aisle. Long story short, I sent her a couple of texts and she never responded. Maybe she thought I was a deranged ax murderer and changed her phone number and locks as soon as she got home. Maybe after thinking about it for a while she just realized that what I did was kind of weird and she smelled the strange on me and retreated.

I felt stupid but didn’t want to give up that easily. I figured okay I need to do this in a more standard context that makes more sense. So when I got the next invite for some parent-student-get-to-know-each-other-brunch-thing at school, I went, even though I hate those things. I always just stand around with a cup of fruit punch while trying not to breathe in the waves of tween body odor and watching all the other parents act like they’ve been best buddies since elementary school. Anyway, I went, by myself. I talked to the one person whose face I vaguely remembered and then went from there, casually scoping out other people who looked friendly enough to indulge in a conversation with one of the moms (me) who never shows up to these things. One of them looked approachable in that “I’ll stop what I’m doing to give you directions even though you could just look it up on your phone” kind of way, so I introduced myself. Our kids were in the same class or something, great! We made small talk and she seemed fun so before I left I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk or have coffee sometime. She said yes. This time the coffee thing actually happened and it was fine, but she stopped responding to my text messages after and I wondered if I had said something stupid or shared too much or not enough or was too weird or cursed too much.

Then the pandemic hit and we pretty much stayed home for more than a year. We did move to a new neighborhood during the pandemic and I was excited to maybe meet some new people that way. When we got there our neighbors seemed very friendly, coming over to talk to us, bringing us cookies, introducing themselves, etc. One family said they’d have us over for a barbecue. I said yes, we’d love that! I didn’t tell them we had six kids and didn’t eat meat. I thought it be better left for our second conversation. It’s a year later now and that barbecue hasn’t happened. It’s fine, people are busy, but I always think it was probably because I acted like a complete fool with them. The woman was just making small talk with me the first time we met and she said one of those typical things, like wow, six kids, you look great for having six kids! Side note: what does that mean? You are less fat than I thought you’d be? In my head, I always hear it as a comment on my weight (yes, I have issues, I know). Anyway, so she gives me this compliment and I said (I shit you not): “Yeah, and I’m 38 years old!!”

So my lovely neighbor laughed a little unsure and then slowly backed away, waving, because somebody needed a nap or a snack. Yeah, right. I fought the impulse to run after her and explain that I really wasn’t crazy, that I had no idea why I bragged about my age (like a 7-AND-A-QUARTER-year-old), and that after so much time stuck in the house, I just had momentarily forgotten how to be a normal human out in the world.

Things are fine now, we wave and shout hellos and “crazy weather huh?” and that’s it.

Here’s the thing, I think I got too desperate, with both Target and school brunch lady. I didn’t wait for a more natural connection to occur before taking the next step. They might have just felt weird about it because it seemed I just wanted to get to know ANYBODY instead of them specifically. I’d probably think it was weird too if someone basically asked me out at a school function.

So the next time, I waited a little longer. When we moved into the new neighborhood, we had a lot of interactions with a real estate agent who seemed pretty cool. She had a warped sense of humor which I appreciated and seemed generally interesting. After everything was done with the house, I texted her preemptively apologizing if that was weird but that I thought she was fun and if she wanted to go for a hike or something. She did! She didn’t think it was weird! She also tried to meet new people! She loved hiking! And coffee! Next Saturday at 10 am sound good?

I was so excited. Then we walked around for two hours in the blazing heat and she didn’t ask me a single question about myself. Maybe I interrogated her too much or maybe she was just awkward like me, but it felt weird. After the hike I knew her basic life story, she knew nothing about me. We went for another hike a few weeks later and it was the same way. I thought, okay, I’ll try one more time, but she didn’t respond to my texts. Months later she reached out to see if I wanted to hang out, but by that time I figured friendships take a lot of effort and I don’t want to be the only one making it.

That was my last attempt at making real-life friends right here where I am so we can actually do stuff, instead of just texting, messaging, calling, or emailing. I thought maybe I just won’t find anyone here, because there are not that many people here in general, and I don’t fit in very well in particular. So I reached out to some of my friends from the past. Not casual Facebook friends. Close friends who had been important to me. Some of them I had basically abandoned when I joined the Mormon church in college and moved to a different continent. I didn’t stay in contact. Some I had lost touch with after my divorce and moving to a new town and starting a new relationship and blending families which took most of my time and efforts. I had thought about these friends a lot but wasn’t sure how to reach out to them again. If they were mad at me for letting things fizzle.

Some of these contacts have resulted in nothing. Some in a little bit of reminiscing about old times. Some feel like completely different people to me now, some exactly the same. But there are a couple of people who I have been talking to for months now and I am so thankful to have them back in my life.

When I started writing this, I thought I’d be complaining about how it’s too hard to make friends as an adult. It is. I still don’t know how to do it. But I also realized that I’m so lucky I have a few excellent women in my life regardless of where they live. So here’s to the women who knew me as an angsty teenager on a different continent who have been willing to reopen old conversations. The women I only knew from online profile pictures who’ve supported me through leaving a faith and a marriage. The women I have recently met and connected with through writing.

Yes, I reached out to Lessie, too. We still live in different states with few opportunities to see each other, but I realized that my entire life, the women I cared about the most pretty much always lived far away from me. These long-distance relationships are not less than “real” relationships with people who are in the same location. It just happens to be the environmental circumstance but it says nothing about the substance of the friendship.

We messaged back and forth a bit and then talked on the phone. For two hours. It was lovely. Each of us has had a rough go for a few years and the timing was just right to reconnect. We laughed a lot and cried a little and apologized to each other for not staying in touch. And now, we try again.