Neide, my Neide

I’m missing them. I finally have the time that I can sit down and write the people I have needed to write. So I sit and think of what I should write. Something inside me abhors the superficial nothings, yet I am at a loss of what to say. No longer does my life intersect with theirs. I can no longer simply clap my hands and scream "Neide, Neidinha!" and have Neide go to the door with her cane and try and get 2 old chairs from the kitchen to the porch so that we won't see her dirty house (which isn't even dirty) and which we usually end up going and getting the chairs so that she doesn't have to do it herself. To see her smile and pretend she doesn't believe in God, and yet . . . a sadness that I have only had a hint of is deep within her. We never lacked in conversation or laughs together. Sometimes we'd to have to take a taxi in order to get home in time. But now? What can words in a letter mean from someone who is an entirely different world? Do I tell her about my life? Do I tell her how I'm going to be a graduate student? That I won't have to worry where I can live for the next two years? How can I tell her how I go out with friends or family out to eat and spend on a meal what she spends on food for two weeks? How can I tell her that I don't have debt like her 18 year old son will have for the next two years? How I don't have to worry about my mortgage, diabetes, x-husbands, wayward children. I remember explaining to investigators our temporary status as a missionary and said that we would always return to "vida normal" but now I'm back to normal life and I realize that my normal life is nothing like hers and now ours will never even intersect. What can I write? What can I write to the woman who gave me bright red lipstick and said she wouldn’t go to church unless I wore it there?
Do I not write because I have forgotten her and everyone that touched me on my mission? No, they may think I've forgotten, but I remember and can't stand to think how different our lives our and will only continue to be. Write her? Perhaps, but somehow the guilt of the opulence of my life will keep me from her, and in keeping me from her, I am losing her. I have not forgotten people; I’ve forgotten the me that belonged in her world. I missing myself.