What was it Jax said? “We were never friends”. You wish I had been on time and frankly yes I am a bit sorry. I genuinely hadn’t expected the traffic coming back to be that bad and it wasn’t my intention to be that late. But I don’t know if it really matters in the long run. I think even the best case scenario of that whole thing would have still required me to have taken time away from our friendship. Or whatever it was. It is a special type of pain to have the facade of something so viscerally ripped from deep inside yourself. One that feels so raw to this day.

I asked you why you couldn’t ever be truthful to me. And you made the question about yourself. It was about the lies. About the nonstop talking to me one way and then in private harpooning me. Mocking me. “Does it still hurt?”. I asked, plainly and upfront out of genuine curiosity if you’d ever sent me anon hate and you enthusiastically told me no. Even went as far as to say not unless you did it in your sleep or drunk and then switched back over to your main account. I’ve seen where you were actively talking about doing it in the moment, inciting others to follow suit. And let’s remember the preceding action to that anon, a few months prior when you went and liked a post out of the blue and then didn’t follow up. What was it you said? That something came up? That by the time you got back to it you had already been blocked by me a few days after you’d initially done it? Because the way you mocked the fact that I blocked you, protecting myself from being potentially harassed online, shows no sign of that excuse. The way you laughed and mocked it, saying you’d “hurt my ego” while taking obvious enjoyment from it was frankly vile, mean spirited, and childish.

And the worst part is, if you had just admitted to it and just said “hey I’m sorry, I did and that was wrong of me” then I wouldn’t have been angry. But you decided to hide it, to lie about it. Probably because you didn’t want to sour me against you if I had to guess, not when you were making jokes that you were just going to use me a little bit.

At this intermission I want to address something else. I need you to know, to let it sink in, just how absurdly anxiety building it is to talk to you like this. That over the course of knowing you, I have subconsciously come to dread having a disagreement or argument with you. You wondered why I was scared of you? Look at the way you blew up. I’d spent years seeing the way you treat people you don’t like or that fall from your good graces. You wield your anger and temper simultaneously like a cudgel and a scalpel. I dread talking to you like this, I feel terrified like a kicked dog and that’s sad that it’s how I feel about someone I called my best friend. I don’t know how much you do it purposefully and how much is subconscious. It’s of little solace to the target of it either way. I still deal with lingering guilt due to being tongue lashed for responding with worry and concern when you would say things that most people later in my life would have classified as suicide baiting, when in all reality I was simply just the only one with the means to so easily go over there to check on you. I am so sure if so many of your online friends had lived nearby to you, several of them would have done the same thing of going over there. And I was made to feel guilty and stupid for doing so. And I still carry that to this day.

I asked, practically begged, that I be allowed to tell the person I was potentially going into a relationship with about some of the things we’d talked about in private. And you said no, as if it wouldn’t immediately cause me to keep quiet about it like a Pearl from steven universe. In large part because of what I just got done telling you, if I’d disobeyed you then it would have brought your ire down on me. Not that it had ever stopped you from talking about parts of those conversations to them anyways, laughing away the idea you’d in person to me seemed to think wasn’t a bad idea about me attending therapy with you to learn more about your disorders in general and how to help you manage your specific cases of them. No it was entirely okay for you to talk about it divorced from the context of why it had been suggested by me and done so you could laugh it off about how your therapist would “call you out on your bullshit” in private.

Divorced from context is an interesting turn of phrase when it comes to you. It is frankly ridiculous to constantly make claims of me being obsessed with you but then divorce it from the reality of how it had been made to be. How often the onus was on me to reach out to try and hangout. How at times you wouldn’t even ask me upfront to hangout or go do something but instead would maneuver it into a situation where I would offer it. I still remember the new years eve where you told me how hurt you were that I’d not been there and around much for the horrible and traumatic year you’d had, how mind numbingly guilty it had made me feel. And now I think back and realize that I can’t even remember you trying to reach out to hang out or anything, and certainly not that you’d been regularly flatly turned down. You were hurting, justifiably so from everything that had happened. But it was wrong to place so much of the guilt of it on me at the time and it turns into a worrying pattern of behavior when held up to everything else. To claim obsession so strongly like you have while also moving in such a way that it can be made into evidence supporting your own claim is just ridiculous. It’s the only word I’m coming up with at the moment.

And the accusation of policing your language. By asking you to please not continue the quip that I’m obsessed with you. At its core, I was asking because I hate it. I’ve always hated and been uncomfortable with it. But I’d accepted it in the past as some twisted form of penance. But make no mistake, I was always aware of how it was used as a way of downplaying the feelings I’d had for Sam. And I wasn’t wanting Alyx to get further dragged into that belief while she was trying to form her own opinions about me. And most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, I could not stand any longer to hear it. To be back handedly demeaned and have my own personal feelings on something be treated like lies and not real. It felt so utterly dehumanizing and so I was making a request. A boundary. And the fact that you took it as policing your language is utterly without merit. It isn’t policing to request a joke stop being said due to it making a friend uncomfortable and erased and it’s really shitty that you threw that in my face when it was a rare moment of me trying to make a boundary.

The way you told me that you wished you could just be happy for us and just let me have it was such a weird thing to say, and really sets off some very uncomfortable feelings on if you ever viewed me as anything more than a possession and “yours”. Especially considering this all isn’t the first time you’ve gotten upset when I was about to potentially enter a relationship. And you have also gotten jealous before of a partner I was dating.

You utterly railroaded the first attempt to sit down and talk to you and then shut down communication only to then get upset and act like you’re being ostracized. You quite literally distanced yourself. The fact that you knew we were going out on a date, a nice one where I had planned it in advance and even paid money to get a hotel room for her and I and what did you do? You were so set off by the fact that we were being happy together and enjoying each other that you couldn’t stop looking at a messenger group chat that you could have muted that you felt the need to just disappear from the group entirely. You knew we were on a date and even then you still had to go and make the night about you, causing us to have to stop and send someone to go check on you so we could try to focus back on each other like we’d originally planned. It was a lovely date, but make no mistake that you completely threw mud into it.

You were selfish, childish, a compulsive liar, have manipulated me and maybe others. You left deep, jagged wounds in the very foundation of my trust that will take so long to heal. I’m not even certain they will ever fully heal. To be confronted with the reality that you always shovel talked me behind closed doors and never had anything positive to say to me while being smiley and nice to my face is a wound that will take a lifetime to recover from.

So congratulations. You successfully kinned a character so much that’ll I’ll never hear Jax say “We were never friends” without imagining it being you saying it.

You made me feel like a dog.

You made me feel like Laika, brought in to be used for someone’s needs and desires only to be discarded once the use was gone.