Contacts are gone...except when composing a message?

Backstory:
I originally got my iPhone 4S in June of last year. Before moving to iOS, I used Android. To get my contacts to show up on my 4S I added a "CardDAV" account to sync my contacts from my google account to my iPhone. In October of last year, the account password was reset and I lost access to the account. Every time I entered the contacts app, the phone would prompt me to enter the password for my CardDAV account. This persisted for about two months, and then the phone finally just stopped asking me for the account password.
A couple weeks ago, I went to my iCloud settings and flipped the "Contacts" sync to on.. because I planned on upgrading my phone soon. Fast forward to yesterday, I delete the CardDAV account from my settings because it hasn't synced my contacts with Google for over a year. As soon as I delete the CardDAV account, all of my contacts disappear. My contacts app says I have no contacts. I went to iCloud to see if my contacts were backed up like I told it to, and there is only one entry in my contacts, which is myself. Since iCloud didn't save my contacts like I thought it was doing, I finally guessed my password and was able to login to my Google account. After looking, the last time it synced my contacts was October of last year.
If neither iCloud or Google was saving my contacts... where did they go, and how do I get them back?
Thank you for your help!

EDIT: Sorry, I forgot to add what I mentioned in the title. While trying to move around my phone to try and find out where my contacts may be, I found that if I go to the messaging app and compose a message, I can type a contacts name in and send them a message as long as I have a thread in the app with them. In the app itself, all of my message threads still show up as phone numbers.

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Contacts are gone...except when composing a message?

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