My Oldest Friend

I remember her smile before I remember anything she ever believed.

It wasn’t just bright, it was generative. It did something to a room. Conversations loosened around it. People stood a little taller in it. You didn’t feel evaluated in her presence. You felt allowed.

She had a way of making you feel like you were already enough.

Now she tells me she isn’t.

“I’m flawed,” she says, not with hesitation but with certainty.

“I need a savior.”

And I find myself holding two versions of her at once.

The one who sat across from me years ago, laughing without restraint, singing Beatles songs outside the high school after a dance, not because life was easy but because she refused to make it smaller than it was.

And the one who sits across from me now, choosing her words more carefully, as if they’re being checked against something invisible.

Back then, her kindness wasn’t explained.

It didn’t come with a source citation. It didn’t need one. It moved outward from her naturally, like light from a flame that didn’t question whether it was allowed to burn.

Now, that same kindness is still there, but it’s different. Redirected. Credited elsewhere.

“It’s not me,” she says sometimes. “It’s Him working through me.”

And I want to ask, but don’t, what was it before?

Because I remember.

I remember the way she showed up for people with no sense that she was participating in something cosmic or eternal. She wasn’t storing up treasure. She wasn’t reflecting borrowed glory. She was just… good.

Not perfect. Not pure. Not anything that needed defending.

Just human in the best possible way.

Now she speaks of herself as if she is fundamentally lacking.

As if the very qualities that once defined her - her warmth, her openness, her instinctive generosity, are insufficient unless they are anchored to something beyond her.

And still, every so often, her smile sneaks through.

The old one.

Unlicensed. Unattributed. Untheologized.

It catches me off guard as much as anyone else, like a memory that hasn’t been fully rewritten.

In those moments, she isn’t waiting to be lit.

She is the light.

Which is why I can’t quite accept the logic that underlies all of this.

We are told, quietly, persistently, that belief is the safer path. That if there is a God, belief secures everything, and if there isn’t, nothing is lost.

That argument traces back, in its most famous form, to Blaise Pascal’s wager

But watching her, I can’t help but think the wager was incomplete.

Because something is at stake.

Not in some distant, unknowable future, but here, in the texture of a life.

In the shift from being a source of light to believing you must be illuminated.

In the quiet replacement of self-trust with self-suspicion.

In the subtle but persistent idea that whatever is best in you does not truly belong to you.

And yet, it hasn’t fully taken.

That’s the part that stays with me.

Because the light I knew in her was never fragile. It was never conditional. It didn’t depend on belief to exist, and it doesn’t seem entirely willing to disappear now.

It breaks through.

In a laugh that comes too quickly to be filtered.

And then it’s gone again.

Replaced by something more careful. More deliberate. As if even joy now needs permission before it can fully arrive.

That’s when it settles in, not as an argument, but as a quiet recognition.

The wager was lost.

Not in the way it was originally imagined. Not in some cosmic calculation of heaven and hell, gain and loss.

But here.

In the slow dimming of something that once burned without hesitation.

In the way I now have to look a little harder to find her, not because she’s disappeared, but because she’s been reframed, redirected, taught to step aside from herself.

The friend I knew is still there, I think. She has to be. You don’t erase something like that completely.

But she’s harder to reach now. Harder to see.

As if she’s standing just behind the person she believes she’s supposed to be.

And the loss isn’t only mine.

It belongs to every room she used to walk into and quietly transform.

To every person who felt, if only for a moment, more whole simply because she was herself without question.

There was a time when her presence expanded the world.

Now, somehow, it contracts around her.

Not completely. Not irreversibly. But enough to notice.

Enough to feel.

And that’s the part no philosophy accounted for.

That in choosing to believe she was not enough, she gave up something that already was.

Not perfectly. Not permanently.

But enough that those of us who knew her can’t help but feel it.

The difference.

The absence.

The space where her light used to move freely, now flickering, now waiting, now explained.

And the world, for having once known it, is somehow less.