The Stalking Is Coming From Inside The House.

She wanted to replace all the cups in her house. It was not a big deal, she just wanted all her cups to be white and uniform, but her partner thought it was unnecessary to do it. Their cups were fine. Still, she was adamant so she asked me for a favour. She told me that she would tell him that we were doing the dishes and we put all the cups in a tray after we washed and dried them, and then she gave them to me to place them in the cabinet and on my way there, I dropped the tray and broke every single cup in the house. I didn’t actually have to break the cups, she would donate them, but I just had to say that I had tripped and smashed all of them.

“You know he will believe it if you say that, you don’t ever lie,” she said, trying to convince me to do it, “Besides, everyone knows you are always tripping, falling and generally breaking stuff by accident.”

I agreed to help her. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was stupid as fuck. If she wanted to buy new cups, she should have just fucking bought new cups, I don’t understand why that warranted a discussion but I get it, in their relationship it warranted a discussion and she wanted to avoid unnecessary arguments with her partner and she was right, accidently smashing an entire tray of cups is extremely believable as something that would happen to me if you know me. What the hell, right? What kind of person doesn’t help their best-friend get a set of new cups? I did it. He believed me. She got her cups.

I share that story because it very accurately conveys the root of the nature of our relationship. I’ve always been that person, you know? The person on whom you can pin absolutely anything and it would be believable, and you can basically count on me to help you out of a tough spot by putting myself in the line of fire because it doesn’t matter to me. I didn’t mean to stay out late, Ancilla made me. I didn’t know my ex would be at that party, Ancilla invited him. I didn’t want to smoke pot, Ancilla was doing it so I just took a drag. I didn’t say that, Ancilla did, but it does make sense, doesn’t it? I didn’t want to do that, Ancilla was doing it so I just did it with her. I’m a very easy target because whatever it is you’re likely in trouble for, I’m probably already doing it so if there are the type of people in your life who would make issue out of your actions, and you are the type of person who doesn’t want to take responsibility for your actions, I’m your girl. Especially, if you are my best fucking friend.

So, I was her girl.

My relationship with her is complicated, difficult to adequately address within the ease of an essay and very easy to turn into gossip-fodder which is why, even though, I have been suffering from its demise for the past year, I have said very little about it out loud. For a long time, I wouldn’t even discuss it with my partner because every single feeling I had in the aftermath felt wrong. Primarily, the fear. It took a few attempts to end this relationship and each time, when I went back, I knew it was going to happen again but I needed to wait until there was a legitimate reason, so I did, and then the entire cycle would repeat itself. When I did finally leave (or, she did), I experienced a very familiar feeling. The same fear I had felt when I left an abusive, romantic relationship over a decade ago. The fear of needing to look over my shoulder constantly, the fear of bracing for retaliation and the fear of an attack of some kind directed at me and so I retreated as far away from her life as I could. I’m not saying my friend abused me, I am not even sure what I am really saying, but I know I need to say something because the silence has deafened my insides and my soul has retreated into a crypt of isolation where I peer out of crack in the wall, watching and waiting, for the world to feel safe again.

Let me back up a little bit.

I met my friend through her partner when I was twenty-one, I was negotiating some kind of play with her partner, and she showed up at the date we had scheduled, alongside him. It was love at first sight, with her, I mean, because some people are just like that. I will say this now because it is a large part of the truth of our relationship – she is my soulmate – and that doesn’t mean we belong together, or even that we are good for each other, it means that no matter what version of our lives we had lived, our connection would have been undeniable, unavoidable and almost, destined. I am not maudlin about much, but I am about love. I love her. For over a decade, we were family to each other. Through careers, partners, various cities, divorces, weddings, pregnancies, children and health issues. She was my person, I was her person. She was herself with me, something that was very difficult for her around other people because of a predisposition to putting up barriers and acts, and she swore me to secrecy about much of what she said around me. We were deliriously happy around each other and I will always miss that. I will miss the hours of yoga, shopping at street markets, eating seafood salads, talking about everything in the world and getting high on the balcony while everyone else slept.

But there was another side to the relationship.

In the last two years, her relationship with her long-term partner started to suffer and she wanted to leave. She told me that and I kept it to myself. I also noticed that her partner had started to grow cold around me, we had been friends for years and suddenly, something was different. Finally, one day, he told me that he believed that I was convincing her to leave him. It was the damn cups all over again. When I asked her, she said there were things that were hard for her to say to him directly but if she told him I had said them, it was not so difficult. I told her to stop. She said she would. She didn’t. In the next year, he blamed me for losing her, for losing his family, for her worsening mental health, for the type of sex she started to have with others, for anything anyone else said about him that didn’t align with his view of himself and for her suicidal ideation. I stayed by my friend, who at every single step, threw me under the bus. She’d say horrible things about him to me, then go to him and very gently, insinuate those ideas came from me. That should have been enough for me but it wasn’t.

The thing that really broke me was way creepier. All through our relationship, I believed we were two of a kind. It often felt like that. We said the same things, we thought the same things and we even desired the same things. Except, we really didn’t. If you’ve ever had someone be dangerously obsessed with you, you might understand how they orchestrate these kinds of things. There were odd things all along. For instance, she would frequently record our conversations. I would say things to her and as we were discussing, she would turn on her recorder, and then, often months later, she would repeat those stories back to me, with slight modifications, as if they were her own. It started with small things, until she was basically telling me that my entire life story was coincidentally exactly everything that had happened to her as well. I often write notes when I am talking to people, I just scribble on a piece of paper in front of me, and since I talked to her a lot, I did this around her and she would keep those papers, and then she’d suggest those ideas back to me and when I said that I had said something so similar earlier, she’d reinforce the idea that we were exactly the same.

After she left her partner, she began a strange sexual competition as well. Our sexualities, at least as I had known them prior to that, were very different but people change, you know? I attributed it to that. I don’t own violence, anyone can love it but it got to the point where she just started to do it to brandish it to me. She often told me she wished she had my emotional mechanisms, habits and brain, but she fawned so frequently that I tuned it out, but it started to get unsettling, to the point where I felt like I had to be careful what I said around her because it felt like an evil genie was taking my words, twisting them on their head and wreaking havoc on the suspecting parties in her life. She played games with everyone, turning their lives in fodder for her entertainment, and then came back and told me she had learnt it from me. I had been the teacher and even when I confronted her, nothing was ever her fault. It was the pills, the weed, the mental health, the break up, other people and how difficult her life was. There was not a shred of accountability in her about any of her behaviour.

I thought her to be one of the most honest people I knew but everything was a lie built on a dangerous obsession, the extent of which I only discovered when I learned she was keeping folders and folders full of my writing and recordings on her computer to pour over and model herself after. It was only then that I was creeped out enough to leave but like my relationship with my former partner, I had to escape this relationship too. I had to wait for a moment when it was safe, when she thought she was mad and it was her idea, because I was scared. I was scared of what an unstable, obsessive person does in this situation.

I am still scared.

But at least, I cannot be quiet anymore.