This is not the story I want to live and tell.
I read in one of Sylvia Browne's books that if a relationship of any kind is hard to make it through, then something's wrong. I love Sylvia and all, but I'm forced to think that she's putting her message out there a little too strong on this one. If I were to keep only the relationships that have not been long, hard-traveled roads in my life, you'd find me in the empty square of my living room playing with my thoughts and fluffly old cocker spaniel for the rest of my life (oh wait- for the rest of his life, that probably is). Which is exactly where I am today, in fact.
Elena got my texts this morning and texted me back asking me what my problem was, because she thought we were okay. Well, today the clouds broke for me and the sun shone in to illuminate a very bleak and lonely but nonetheless REAL reality. We are not okay. Elena may have been beyond my best friend in high school and what I could have sworn was my spiritual sister for life after that, but she betrayed me in ways I blind my eyes to the world not to see everyday since she's come crawling back into my life. Her boyfriend punches holes in the wall and calls her unnattractive compared to other girls, yet she let our friendship fade with the passage of the first chapter of both our lives when I had a moody summer. (No! Correction, she let it fade as soon as Rob came into her life romantically, and picked that week to tell me I had changed into a nasty old person in a twenty-something year old body who stopped caring about anyone but herself. Then I left for my dad's house and she called me after a week to apologize and see how I was doing, but I was at rock bottom and acted more cruel and sardonic to her than I had during the summer when I was losing almost all my health and felt so miserable to be living back in the ghost of Jersey). The sun had set in my life, but not in a good way..or at least it didn't seem so back then. But Elena had no sympathy for the fact that a) At one point I had little to no control over my mood swings, and any fool could see that because they often came with fevers, shakes, or debilitaing pain that had me in a lifeless-looking ball on the bathroom floor when everyone shut the lights and went to sleep. And b) Poor, unfortunate, lonely unlucky duckling Rob had undiagnosed bipolar and keeps raging or insulting everytime Elena has an interest in anything other than him. See, he can punch walls and leave emotional dents in Elena's life because he's "got something to deal with." Me, I wasn't even given a post-it the second time out friendship died. At least when I ended it the first time I did it to become healthy and both told her and sent a kind letter wishing her well, hoping for friendship in the future and promising to keep spiritually in touch. Elena had her mother come upstairs and deliver the message that I had to back my aching self up and go off to wherever place in this world would have me, which I was blessed and cursed to find was my dad's house by the shore. She told me later that she was so hurt about our friendship dying that she wanted to die herself and Rob was beginning to really fear our friendship was more than that because of the many disatrous dramas that are one of its hallmarks. But even though she daid it in her own vivid words later, I didn't believe her then that she could feel as damaged and mishaped and dead inside as I did without her as my sister. And when I hear about the awful shit she puts up with now (and talks my ear off about as if I'm really invisible or have no life of my own), I'm supposed to say..what? I'm intuitive and as much as I hate for my sake it I see them wroking it out and getting married eventually. I bet Rob has NO FUCKING IDEA how many times he's had me in part to thank for his girlfriend coming back to talk things over and try to work it out with limits. I see my best friend and her connections with people beyond what an outsider would see and label, just as she does the loves and losses of the road I walk in life. Elena thoguht we were okay and so did I before I realized that this peach-tinted road we're walking down as renewed fast friends is all wrong, because there's still a hole in me where my best friend ditched me for a guy after doing everything she could at one point to chase one out of my life. My relationship with John became a running ghost almost before it was even real, not only because my self-esteem couldn't take a pure love right then but also because I didn't want to hurt Elena. It was stupid of me and that was all on my shoulders, but to know she cared so little about my friendship as to enact her most dreaded fear of something I could to on me, turning the tables. She really didn't stop wanting to heal our friendship until Rob came into her life, and she really would have probably killed me if I ahd done that to her. It got me to telling myself for months that the one female I saw eye to eye with and had been a sister to since we were kids was only using me since I got sick because she hates being alone. Whatever it was, I'd told myself at the end of summer even though I could feel she still loved and needed me in her life, our friendship was dead and she had been a fake. Her life was Rob and mine had to start being me. Now it is me, and the ways Elena betrayed me are black, nagging holes in the pit of my stomache that I can't forget even to save the happy sweetness of our friendship now. She'd texted me this morning that I hit so below the belt and hurt her. So I texted her back in the milky orange dawn that I can't help how I feel and it's her choice if she doesn't want to be my friend again in the future when things are better. And then I cried for the next three hours because I decided to let it all out and explain through typed words that I thought she was a hypocrite for putting up with shit from Rob but leaving me alone with no one when I actually did have real problems to deal with besides just crazy shit in my head like he has. I wrote and felt and meant that I really didn't want a friend who allowed someone else to influence her decision to leave my life and speak nasty, untrue shit about me being manipulative and competitive and wanting to "steal her thunder." Everyone who really knows me knows that's the last thing I am, and I cannot imagine what Elena would do if John or Blair or anyone of mine said that about her. A bomb would go off in my life and she'd never forgive me for another three years. I texted all this to her cell and she texted me back that I was nothing but a gray soul just like my mother trying to bring her down, and that the sweet and kind Lindsay of the past has been gone for a long time. Apparently in place of the ghost of the Lindsay of the past is a greedy, bitter, emotioanlly deadweight user who only hung out with her for money and a roof over my head last summer. I went more numb than I ever have in my whole life when these words of jumped in final black text off my phone from her to me, and the whole room went cloudy as I typed my response. I told her I knew when she called me again that her biploar was doing badly again and she couldn't think for herself, and sent my most nasty wishes that someday her and Rob both join the real world or she finds someone who isn't happy when she loses people who actually care. Because Rob definitely seemed happy about the worst fight we ever had. Elena then texted me that she would get a restraining order if I harrassed her and since I've never harrassed anyone but Blair in my life, I was almost too taken aback to respond. But I felt compelled to tell her what a delusional, dependent creep I thought she was now and that I regretted our entire friendship, so she could go cry on her manipulative boyfriend's shoulder about it when she woke up and realized how crazy she'd sounded. I'm gone forever, I told her. I don't even like who you are now, I went on. Maybe she even seeped back into my life after our last fight in November, I wrote, because Rob became too much and she was desperate for some kind of social life or outlet.
Then I made myself tea and cried tears that felt somehow stupid and unnatural like all my fights with Elena since we were thirteen have felt, only this time I had to mean it if I wanted any pride inside me. I was sure she felt the same way, but she texted me back that she was sorry she called my soul gray and doesn't really think that, was just mad. I texted her back that I was sorry I said she didn't have her own mind, but was just hurt about the past. We texted that we loved each other and left it at that, and it's not good. Why does this always, always happen with us?? I've searched myself deep down for years in the past about whether or not I have feelings for her that go beyond friendship, but I don't. She says she feels the same, yet she admits she gets jealous and scared of my abadonment when I have a boyfriend and I feel the same way when she does. And I do feel sexually jealous in a way; I feel as if I drain from her life if she has romance in it and even when I'm with a guy I feel jealous of her natural femininity. I am sometimes pretty as a picture and dress sexy, but that doesn't make me a WOMAN, that doesn't make me someone whom a guy would want to make love to rather than fuck and see as a real part of a future. Except for Blair. But we hurt each other till neither one of us can breathe within statelines of the other, too. This fight I started with Elena did not begin based on my jealousy of the softness and femininity of her personality; even last night at the bookstore with her, I felt as if something was not quite right and I would soon feel her leave my life with the winter winds. I also saw her coming back again, and as hard as I shut my eyes to erase the sense with blackness, I still feel us as friends for the rest of both our lives. But it always comes back to that same horrid, greusome, hidden, swollen, painful, almost surreal issue for me. I don't feel like a woman next to my naturally maternal best friend, and now that I don't hate on her for it I just feel so sad and lost as a person around her. It's all so petty in the context of our friendship but in my heart the pain is so real that it floods everything else out when I'm around her sometimes. And I know she would choose Rob over me if he made her. And I'm losing her yet I'm not and it all just hurts too much to breathe sometimes right now. It's all such a complicated web of knives that could so easily be cushioned by tints of peach and love and renewal beneath me, only I won't bite into that apple because I don't know if I can trust. I could have accepted Elena's apologies and explainations like she accepted mine because both were sincere, but I sensed a storm brewing and wanted to cut myself off from being hurt before Rob could get worse and she could crush me into a million little pieces of him. I know how gay I sound right now, but all my relationships are hotly intense even when they're not sexual. Does that mean I need to change? Yes, but the hole of perversion and mistrust that is my past inside of me is so endlessly deep. And everytime I start to heal, it resurfaces in new vivid shapes and colors, variations of the same old pain. I knew deep down intuitively when all these old fears came up yesterday that Elena and me would heal and be friends for life. Why did I not let our friendship take its natural course even though some of my anger from the past is valid? I hate bening hurt. I hate it, yet I make myself one large scab of pain whenever new opportunitues arise. I feel as though I am standing on a shore I swam my whole life to stand on proudly, and all I'm doing is conjuring up the past and making everyone else suffer for things that have been done and are long gone with the wind.
Elena just texted me that she loves me and is okay with what I said and that I'm still her best friend. I didn't give her nearly enough credit and I'm so angry at myself for always jumping the gun before trouble drifts up from the sand other than in my own fearful mind.
Elena got my texts this morning and texted me back asking me what my problem was, because she thought we were okay. Well, today the clouds broke for me and the sun shone in to illuminate a very bleak and lonely but nonetheless REAL reality. We are not okay. Elena may have been beyond my best friend in high school and what I could have sworn was my spiritual sister for life after that, but she betrayed me in ways I blind my eyes to the world not to see everyday since she's come crawling back into my life. Her boyfriend punches holes in the wall and calls her unnattractive compared to other girls, yet she let our friendship fade with the passage of the first chapter of both our lives when I had a moody summer. (No! Correction, she let it fade as soon as Rob came into her life romantically, and picked that week to tell me I had changed into a nasty old person in a twenty-something year old body who stopped caring about anyone but herself. Then I left for my dad's house and she called me after a week to apologize and see how I was doing, but I was at rock bottom and acted more cruel and sardonic to her than I had during the summer when I was losing almost all my health and felt so miserable to be living back in the ghost of Jersey). The sun had set in my life, but not in a good way..or at least it didn't seem so back then. But Elena had no sympathy for the fact that a) At one point I had little to no control over my mood swings, and any fool could see that because they often came with fevers, shakes, or debilitaing pain that had me in a lifeless-looking ball on the bathroom floor when everyone shut the lights and went to sleep. And b) Poor, unfortunate, lonely unlucky duckling Rob had undiagnosed bipolar and keeps raging or insulting everytime Elena has an interest in anything other than him. See, he can punch walls and leave emotional dents in Elena's life because he's "got something to deal with." Me, I wasn't even given a post-it the second time out friendship died. At least when I ended it the first time I did it to become healthy and both told her and sent a kind letter wishing her well, hoping for friendship in the future and promising to keep spiritually in touch. Elena had her mother come upstairs and deliver the message that I had to back my aching self up and go off to wherever place in this world would have me, which I was blessed and cursed to find was my dad's house by the shore. She told me later that she was so hurt about our friendship dying that she wanted to die herself and Rob was beginning to really fear our friendship was more than that because of the many disatrous dramas that are one of its hallmarks. But even though she daid it in her own vivid words later, I didn't believe her then that she could feel as damaged and mishaped and dead inside as I did without her as my sister. And when I hear about the awful shit she puts up with now (and talks my ear off about as if I'm really invisible or have no life of my own), I'm supposed to say..what? I'm intuitive and as much as I hate for my sake it I see them wroking it out and getting married eventually. I bet Rob has NO FUCKING IDEA how many times he's had me in part to thank for his girlfriend coming back to talk things over and try to work it out with limits. I see my best friend and her connections with people beyond what an outsider would see and label, just as she does the loves and losses of the road I walk in life. Elena thoguht we were okay and so did I before I realized that this peach-tinted road we're walking down as renewed fast friends is all wrong, because there's still a hole in me where my best friend ditched me for a guy after doing everything she could at one point to chase one out of my life. My relationship with John became a running ghost almost before it was even real, not only because my self-esteem couldn't take a pure love right then but also because I didn't want to hurt Elena. It was stupid of me and that was all on my shoulders, but to know she cared so little about my friendship as to enact her most dreaded fear of something I could to on me, turning the tables. She really didn't stop wanting to heal our friendship until Rob came into her life, and she really would have probably killed me if I ahd done that to her. It got me to telling myself for months that the one female I saw eye to eye with and had been a sister to since we were kids was only using me since I got sick because she hates being alone. Whatever it was, I'd told myself at the end of summer even though I could feel she still loved and needed me in her life, our friendship was dead and she had been a fake. Her life was Rob and mine had to start being me. Now it is me, and the ways Elena betrayed me are black, nagging holes in the pit of my stomache that I can't forget even to save the happy sweetness of our friendship now. She'd texted me this morning that I hit so below the belt and hurt her. So I texted her back in the milky orange dawn that I can't help how I feel and it's her choice if she doesn't want to be my friend again in the future when things are better. And then I cried for the next three hours because I decided to let it all out and explain through typed words that I thought she was a hypocrite for putting up with shit from Rob but leaving me alone with no one when I actually did have real problems to deal with besides just crazy shit in my head like he has. I wrote and felt and meant that I really didn't want a friend who allowed someone else to influence her decision to leave my life and speak nasty, untrue shit about me being manipulative and competitive and wanting to "steal her thunder." Everyone who really knows me knows that's the last thing I am, and I cannot imagine what Elena would do if John or Blair or anyone of mine said that about her. A bomb would go off in my life and she'd never forgive me for another three years. I texted all this to her cell and she texted me back that I was nothing but a gray soul just like my mother trying to bring her down, and that the sweet and kind Lindsay of the past has been gone for a long time. Apparently in place of the ghost of the Lindsay of the past is a greedy, bitter, emotioanlly deadweight user who only hung out with her for money and a roof over my head last summer. I went more numb than I ever have in my whole life when these words of jumped in final black text off my phone from her to me, and the whole room went cloudy as I typed my response. I told her I knew when she called me again that her biploar was doing badly again and she couldn't think for herself, and sent my most nasty wishes that someday her and Rob both join the real world or she finds someone who isn't happy when she loses people who actually care. Because Rob definitely seemed happy about the worst fight we ever had. Elena then texted me that she would get a restraining order if I harrassed her and since I've never harrassed anyone but Blair in my life, I was almost too taken aback to respond. But I felt compelled to tell her what a delusional, dependent creep I thought she was now and that I regretted our entire friendship, so she could go cry on her manipulative boyfriend's shoulder about it when she woke up and realized how crazy she'd sounded. I'm gone forever, I told her. I don't even like who you are now, I went on. Maybe she even seeped back into my life after our last fight in November, I wrote, because Rob became too much and she was desperate for some kind of social life or outlet.
Then I made myself tea and cried tears that felt somehow stupid and unnatural like all my fights with Elena since we were thirteen have felt, only this time I had to mean it if I wanted any pride inside me. I was sure she felt the same way, but she texted me back that she was sorry she called my soul gray and doesn't really think that, was just mad. I texted her back that I was sorry I said she didn't have her own mind, but was just hurt about the past. We texted that we loved each other and left it at that, and it's not good. Why does this always, always happen with us?? I've searched myself deep down for years in the past about whether or not I have feelings for her that go beyond friendship, but I don't. She says she feels the same, yet she admits she gets jealous and scared of my abadonment when I have a boyfriend and I feel the same way when she does. And I do feel sexually jealous in a way; I feel as if I drain from her life if she has romance in it and even when I'm with a guy I feel jealous of her natural femininity. I am sometimes pretty as a picture and dress sexy, but that doesn't make me a WOMAN, that doesn't make me someone whom a guy would want to make love to rather than fuck and see as a real part of a future. Except for Blair. But we hurt each other till neither one of us can breathe within statelines of the other, too. This fight I started with Elena did not begin based on my jealousy of the softness and femininity of her personality; even last night at the bookstore with her, I felt as if something was not quite right and I would soon feel her leave my life with the winter winds. I also saw her coming back again, and as hard as I shut my eyes to erase the sense with blackness, I still feel us as friends for the rest of both our lives. But it always comes back to that same horrid, greusome, hidden, swollen, painful, almost surreal issue for me. I don't feel like a woman next to my naturally maternal best friend, and now that I don't hate on her for it I just feel so sad and lost as a person around her. It's all so petty in the context of our friendship but in my heart the pain is so real that it floods everything else out when I'm around her sometimes. And I know she would choose Rob over me if he made her. And I'm losing her yet I'm not and it all just hurts too much to breathe sometimes right now. It's all such a complicated web of knives that could so easily be cushioned by tints of peach and love and renewal beneath me, only I won't bite into that apple because I don't know if I can trust. I could have accepted Elena's apologies and explainations like she accepted mine because both were sincere, but I sensed a storm brewing and wanted to cut myself off from being hurt before Rob could get worse and she could crush me into a million little pieces of him. I know how gay I sound right now, but all my relationships are hotly intense even when they're not sexual. Does that mean I need to change? Yes, but the hole of perversion and mistrust that is my past inside of me is so endlessly deep. And everytime I start to heal, it resurfaces in new vivid shapes and colors, variations of the same old pain. I knew deep down intuitively when all these old fears came up yesterday that Elena and me would heal and be friends for life. Why did I not let our friendship take its natural course even though some of my anger from the past is valid? I hate bening hurt. I hate it, yet I make myself one large scab of pain whenever new opportunitues arise. I feel as though I am standing on a shore I swam my whole life to stand on proudly, and all I'm doing is conjuring up the past and making everyone else suffer for things that have been done and are long gone with the wind.
Elena just texted me that she loves me and is okay with what I said and that I'm still her best friend. I didn't give her nearly enough credit and I'm so angry at myself for always jumping the gun before trouble drifts up from the sand other than in my own fearful mind.