the blog i never update

I've been wondering when it'll be 'elephant in the room' time, but I don't know that it ever really will be. Having your best friend of 20+ years tell you 50 ways you suck* and then disappear into the ether is never going to be something I just write about once then I'm done. It was unnecessarily harsh, the silence continues to be so, and I'm going to keep finding new things to be pissed off about.

The crux of it is in the lies. Sallie told herself (and doubtless everyone around her) so, so many lies about me, and then believed those lies instead of the person she's known and loved for half her life. Instead of talking to me about it, she essayed at me, filling the entire thing with words like 'misinterpret,' 'misunderstand,' 'maybe you didn't intend this.' By her own admission, she invented meaning in everything I said. When she couldn't twist my words into something that fitted her new vision of who I am, then I just got a straight up, 'I don't believe you.'

I don't believe you.

I poured my heart out. I considered every sodding word so carefully so as not to be misunderstood, not to be read as manipulative or anything. I was as raw and open as I could be. I locked SH so the hope of someone reading it would be gone. I wrote the obituary as a reminder to myself to stop blaming the people I love for ending it. I hated myself for feeling like that. I was at my absolute lowest and tried so hard to put that feeling, of being so very alone, into words. I could not have been more honest.

But that honesty doesn't fit with who I am in her mind anymore. I'm manipulative; that was a manipulation to try and make her ask me to read it. HAH. It'd been four years. I still had a skerrick of hope, and that hope was killing my love of writing it. So I removed it. Otherwise, why did I do it in silence? If I was trying to manipulate people into reading it, wouldn't I have bragged to everyone that I'd taken it down because of them? I knew nobody would find it, because nobody had in the past four years.

'You have been heard and very much understood.'

Bullshit. If she'd understood, she wouldn't have had to make up lies to create a new Annarti. If she'd understood, I would've gotten a hug. Genuine support, instead of the hollow, 'I'll support whatever you need to do,' that everyone was giving me around that time. What I needed to do, as it turned out, was to lock it away where nobody could give me hope of reading it. Did I get support for that? No, I got, 'I don't believe you,' and then off she pissed.

The biggest one, though, and the one that rankled at the time, was in dragging Shanra into her argument. Shanra, to whom she hasn't spoken in a decade or so, didn't just have words put in her mouth, but thoughts and feelings put in her head. Sallie decided what Shanra was feeling about the whole situation and has been lying to herself about that, too. She's made up lies for Shanra to feel and, once again, believes those lies rather than talking to the person she's making them up about.

I never asked after her dad after her first email 'back'. Lies. My reply to that email was to ask if we could talk in person, because this was all too big for email. First conversation, hours later, we talked about her dad. She said she felt uncomfortable talking about it. So I didn't bring it up. I'd feel the same, I wouldn't want to talk about it either. My dad's got cancer and I don't want to talk about it much.

I said publically I'd stopped writing, but I was writing in private. Lies. I was done. I'd lost all joy in writing, why would I keep doing it? I had no intention of picking it back up again. To just assume I was writing in private to spite her? Why?

I'm manipulative. Everything I did was to manipulate her specifically into reading SH. Lies. I asked, I begged, I pleaded, and then I gave up. I had no support, nobody had read it in four years. Why would I expect anything to change? Everything I did with SH was for me. It had nothing to do with anyone else. I can't, nor would I ever try to, force anyone to read it. But I can protect myself from how I feel when they don't.

There are little ones, too. Accusing me of a tonal shift, when I'm just saying the same thing I've been saying all along. She decided there was something else going on in my life and I needed to work on that, which just proves how little I was understood at all. This was the biggest thing in my life at that point, and it was a big thing. Assuming I've been nasty to Shanra? Oh right because she needs someone else to drag in and justify her lies, despite not having spoken to Shanra in a decade. The thought that I was blaming her for not reading it because of her illness. No. It's because four years went by without a single sentence of Silent Harmony being read. And let's be clear here: all I did was lock it. I never wanted to shut down our friendship because of it. I said three or four times, silence was a bad idea and communication was the best option. 'Full support,' my arse.

'We'll reconnect in the new year,' she said.

Lies.


* sorry, 50 ways I can improve myself. omfg.