I held my ground. I said to myself, I will not tell the "shared" friends what she has done to me. When those people hate her, it will be because she has taken them for granted/been cruel and disrespectful of them/hurt them, not because they have been influenced by me. When she is alone, she will have done that to herself.
I have some distance now, and I can talk about it somewhat objectively. At the time, I wanted to cut her out of my life because everytime I saw her she reminded me of the pain. Now I still want her out of my life, but because I can not trust her, do not need people in my life who treat me the way she did and because in the end this is better for her too, as you can not learn to respect and not hurt others if there are no repercusions. So that is my choice.
I will not say what she did. But I will say how it felt. When you have been friends with a person for a long time, there is an inherent trust there. You expect that person to talk to you about what is going on in their life, and you expect that you can reasonably trust them to act in your best interests, to respect the things you value. And when you discover that you can't, you die a bit. A part of you that trusts people, that expects others to be decent and honest is gone forever. You start looking twice at the people around you, expecting them at any moment to become raging monsters or dark shadows. You start crossing the street to get away from the whispering steps of someone walking behind you, and putting distance between yourself and tree trunk, dark alleys, heavy foliage, and large groups of people. You find nothing funny, and the laughter of others becomes a sound of treachery and evil. The ground seems a little less solid, the stars a little too close, and the buildings a little too angular.
She has always treated me badly. She loved to tell people all about how she had learnt to "tune me out" when I was "babbling". I knew even then that she needed me, the people who surrounded us were always friends of mine. And all too often she would ignore, or say spiteful things to any one of them. But no matter how badly she behaved she expected them to do everything she wanted. And no matter how badly she behaved, I forgave her, because we had been friends for so long, and it always seemed like not such a big deal in the light of that.
For every person, no matter how forgiving or how tolerant, there is always a line. No matter what you are prepared to put up with, there will be things that are unforgivable. Perhaps she thought I had no such line, perhaps I had been so tolerant in the past that in a way she thought I had given her permission to do what she did. But I have a line, just like everyone else. I have never been one to ask for much for myself, but I found something that I wanted, and then she tried to take that thing from me. I am not sure what she thought would happen, that I would give it to her as I had done before, that I would be so upset that I wouldn't notice what she tried to do, that I would never find out. I expect that she didn't think that I would choose this over her, that I would hold her accountable for her actions. Perhaps she doesn't know me as well as she thinks.
I expect that by now she will have twisted what happened until it comes out looking favourably to her, or at least till she looks like a bystander or an innocent victim. I know that she does that, I can tell you all about the stalking incident *cough* or the they-did-nothing-for-my-birthday fiasco or the "do you think I gave him the wrong idea?" situation or any of the other items on the nine year long list. What she did to me was worse than any of those things. She broke one of the few absolute rules of friendship. No matter how she twists it, I know what happened, I was there, and nothing she can do or say can change that.
Funnily enough I don't know that many people who read my blog will have any idea what I am talking about, though some can probably guess. Its just to document my thoughts really. I am scared that I may have lost a friend or two over this, people who I never told what happened, and who may have ended up with her side of the story, or no side and a lot of confusion. One person in particular seems to have "taken her side" and given that I thought that person had a fair idea of what happened, and I thought that person cared about me and valued my friendship, that hurts me more than I care to admit. But the beauty of it all is that time lends enchantment to the view, and this has made me stronger, and more determined, and has brought me closer to some people that I love, and made me value all the more that thing that she tried to take from me. When it comes down to it, I found happyness, and it didn't cost me anything I wasn't ready to give.
