There's something sinister about the simplicity of all of this, how much could have been solved by not engaging, or not feeling. The option to walk away was always on the table. Surely that would’ve been easier than staying.
My first instinct is to defend her. I try to add nuance into the way I talk about her, as if maybe that’ll make the events somehow less severe. I try to balance out the bad with the good. It was all vague. I’m still not even comfortable with calling what is happening to me “emotional abuse”, despite it being exactly that. Maybe I’m really just protecting myself. I feel so ashamed of being in this position again, of feeling like I did something irreversibly awful, like I deserve this. She told me that the weekend of the trip that the situation caused her to see me in a “new light” and that I don’t have a place in her life anymore. I keep replaying it, I keep wondering if I was supposed to just smile as she breached my comfort and boundaries.
I should’ve seen it coming. The month before, I became an emotional dumping ground for her marriage again. I expressed how bad it made me feel, and she told me how much she stressed about me not trusting her and thinking she was going to “suddenly stop” being my friend. She told me, “I am asking for some normalcy in these trying times from my best friend”, so I tried my best to “be normal” for her. More weeks go by, more surface-level conversations (outside of venting about her husband), more leaving me on read because she was watching movies or playing games with her other “friend”. I kept showing up even though she was withdrawing, trying not to be upset with the broken birthday promises and a half-hearted hangout, where half of the time was spent shopping for her family, being “normal” about her going back on her word because she wanted to spend time with her “friend”, someone who was repeatedly coming up in more and more conversations. What was "normalcy" to her?
I hate that after being dehumanized, disrespected, belittled, my trust destroyed, faced with having to find a “separate living situation” thanks to my private chats with her being weaponized and shown to my roommates...and I still feel loyalty to her. I opened up about her to my family, but I left out anything that would’ve looked bad on her if other people knew, mostly out of embarrassment. After all, what was keeping me there? I could’ve just walked away at any point. If the relationship had always been transactional, if it had always been on her terms, if I was unhappy with how one-sided it often was, if I felt like I was a placeholder, if I truly felt like she was using me, why didn’t I just fucking walk away? How can I call it abuse when I stayed with her through all of it? When she discarded me and then a year later decided that we could be friends again, I crawled back to her. I reintroduced her to my rightfully wary friends. I defended her over and over again, even the week before that stupid fucking trip, I told my friends that she and I were “perfect, totally cool”, that she wasn’t like that anymore. "Our friendship is the best it's ever been, no need to worry. She's my best friend."
How can I still love her? Why do l still get anxious and worry that something I do or say might hurt her? I still get crushed thinking about her not having a real friend when she needs one. Years cultivating a relationship with someone who said they valued honesty, who told me over and over that she loved me.
Is there any way this can even be undone? Every discard before was something small and personal, something that nobody but her and I witnessed and felt. This time around, she humiliated me in public and made a show in front of her “friend” to...impress her? To show her that I actually didn't matter that much to her? What was the point of all of this? To hurt me? Am I that fucking worthless and easy to replace?
So here I am, left with all the secrets I kept for her, promises I made to her, conflicting feelings I'm still struggling with, all of it still rattling inside me. I feel an obligation to honor our “safe space”, even after she made that same space unsafe for me.