I’m tired, half-asleep, and my eyes are closing, but I really want to get this out before I start putting it off and, like everything else I mean to put down here, eventually forget and move on.
The most surreal chain of events has begun to unfold in my life - it started with the tiniest thing: an IM - yesterday - and I have a feeling will unfold into something no one involved can predict; not me, the person sending the message, or anyone else who may have been involved in somehow orchestrating it.
I will try to explain in my dead-tired logic.
Yesterday or two days ago, while I was away from my computer, I got a series of IMs from an unknown sender of a fairly personal nature (not, like, obscene or anything, just indicating that the sender knew me on a pretty personal level). Later I found out that the sender was the husband of a woman who, ten years ago, during a very turbulent time in my life, was my best friend - we’ll call her GW for privacy, and I don’t actually know the husband’s name anyway.
By the time I got back to the computer, he was gone, and my mind pretty much boggled: 10 years of silence culminated with a few lines from her husband asking how have I been and telling me how much he wants to get to know me. So despite the fact that something doesn’t entirely sit right with me, I send back a few lines saying yes, I’m glad he made contact (and, I think, for the most part I am), and that I do miss his wife, and it’s nice to talk to him, and goodnight.
I kinda didn’t expect to hear from him again - random IMs have a way of only happening once, in my experience. Not so this one - again tonight as I was sitting at my computer checking Facebook, a little window popped up and it was him, my personal intruder, who knows intimate details about my life and whose name I don’t even know…
My friend GW, in 6th grade through 8th grade, was absolutely the center of my world. The two of us, rather, were the center of the world. All things revolved around us, and we were inseparable. I depended on her, I trusted her when I trusted no one, I showed myself to her when I was hiding from the world, I believed in her when I thought I might give up on the world and leave it. She was the first true friend I ever had. And, probably, she was the first person in the world to really hurt me.
This leads us to the beginnings of the complexities of what’s going on here. He and I had a very strange conversation tonight. One that left my mind full of questions - What did GW tell him about me? What, exactly, is he doing here? Why didn’t GW contact me herself if she misses me so much? Can I take this at face value or is this some complex revenge plot or some kind of deceit? …Among many, many other questions.
Not to mention the fact that talking to him feels like playing chess blindfolded. For three, maybe four years of my life, GW knew more about me than any other person in the world, knew me better than anyone in the world - probably, in the sense that some things never change, she knows a hell of a lot about me and I would bet only seconds Liz in her knowledge - which I’m sure she’s imparted to him. And I, in turn, know nothing about him. Among the things he said: I am a mastermind of manipulation. Is that so? Can you really begin a good-faith conversation with a statement like that?
And while it might be true that some things don’t change, a lot of things do change - and I think that’s been the point of my life for the past 12 years. I am not the same person I was when GW knew me. There were a complicated and extremely painful set of external circumstances that led to the situations that happened at that time, that led to me leaving Scott County and swearing never to return, that led to me putting serious distance between myself and everyone I had known there - we were all too young and simple to understand those circumstances, and I was judged unfairly for them at the time.
I lost the friends I had then, including GW, when I left for high school, because I stood in judgment for things I couldn’t control and was unfairly convicted by people who couldn’t understand (I’m not saying I blame them - I didn’t fully understand for years either), and I can’t help but wonder - is this just a set-up in which the final act will be another judgment, another conviction?
Lastly, there are good reasons I never talk about or think about the past, my past life in Washington 12 years ago. I’ve built a new life and a new human being over the scars of old pain - and I feel like talking to this person, who has been given all this knowledge of who I was when I was so young and so wounded, is like being forced to look into a mirror and stare at a reflection I am simply not yet ready to see.
I loved GW. She broke my heart when our friendship fell apart, I suppose I am finding out now that I, in turn, in my own way broke hers. But I swore that I would never go back there, and I have to admit I am suspicious and a bit afraid of where this mystery will unfold and carry the three of us unsuspecting players - into reconciliation, or into ruin?
