Down to 4 girl friends

October 21, 2005 - 2:04 a.m.

Did you ever wonder what happened with Christina? A lot has happened since June. Before I even posted that entry, I sent her a brief email just saying that I needed some time away and that I felt like she was using me and was disrespectful to me and my boyfriend. She wrote back, giving me two grand, sparkling middle fingers and told me to go fuck myself. She wrote back subsequent emails (even though I never replied once), tearing me apart, each one getting more and more vicious, until finally she said, “To hell with you. Have a nice life.” Then she began writing stories about me on her blog, revealing personal details about me and my boyfriend, repeatedly hitting below the belt. This is the blog that I built for her, set the whole thing up, customized it, and encouraged her to write in it, and if that isn’t a shining example of GRATITUDE then I don’t know what is.

She turned my gift to her into a weapon to use against me, to tell the world that I am a pretentious asshole that only cares about money. That I live in a fantasy world where I only care about my boyfriend and treat my friends like shit. That I used her daughter as a prop, to make myself look good, like a nurturing mother-type. That I’m frigid. That my boyfriend ignores me and doesn’t care about me. That my boyfriend is my sugar daddy and I will throw anyone under the bus to prevent jeopardizing that sugar daddy relationship.

I think she was hoping that everyone who reads White Helmet would somehow find her blog and read all those things about me, and find out the “TRUTH”.

What she failed to realize is that the only person reading her blog was me, her sole supporter, her biggest fan.

I could have documented the entire incident right here, every email, every text message, every blog entry. And I think it goes without saying that I have enough ammunition to blow the girl to smithereens, but I chose not to. I said my piece, I told a story that I felt was true and justified and that was as far as I wanted to go.

Every friendship has an invisible line, and each party knows exactly where it lies. It is never talked about, and the line is rarely approached. But it is understood that if the line is crossed, the friendship is over and cannot be repaired. Sometimes we cross the line in anger. But even in anger, we know that what we are doing is final, finito, fin. Over. There’s no turning back. There’s no taking back those words, the ones on the other side of the line that are so heartless, cut-throat and brutal.

She crossed that line.

I can’t illustrate to you, my 13 year friendship with Christina. She would say now that I’m a shitty friend and I would say that I’ve always watched over her, like a guardian. I would say I’ve taken more of an active role in her life than anyone else ever has, including her family. I would say that I’ve done less harm to her than anyone she’s ever known.

But I can’t give you 13 years of examples.

The other day I found an old school folder and inside I found a type-written story that I wrote when I was about 19 years old. It was from the first college class I ever took: English 101 at the community college. It was also the first story I ever wrote and I struggled with it and agonized over it for a month, because back then I simply could not express myself and it was damn near physically painful to pull my thoughts out of my head.

It’s really pretty gay and I feel embarrassed when I read it. Partly because it’s soul-baring and partly because I was such a melodramatic teenager and the adult me wants to pat the head of that young girl and say, “Ok, ok, that’s enough. Simmer down now.”

I could only write about what was most important to me, and at the time it was my best friend Christina. I was crushed, because when she turned 18 she basically left home and became a squatter, living nowhere and everywhere, and her life took a turn for the worse. I felt like she abandoned me, and I was devastated that life on the streets was better than life with me.

I rarely heard from her, and when I did it was always supreme drama, she’d be drunk or in jail, or fist fighting a boyfriend. Eventually, she became dead to me, because the person I had known was long gone, and was replaced by a slurring drunk who didn’t remember anything about me.

I found this story in a Yoda folder, printed on dot-matrix computer paper, double spaced with proper paragraph indents.

But I found this story, and it reinforced to me that I am not an asshole, and pretentious. I don’t care about just money. I don’t use and abuse her and her daughter. I’m not frigid and self-absorbed.

All of these years she has chosen not to recognize my love for her. She chose to ignore my devotion, and to dismiss that I am the only person who has ever fully believed in her inner beauty.

She chose to look past everything that I wrote in this story, and to accuse me of being the worst friend a person could have.

I wrote this story 10 years ago, I found it a few days ago, and it reinforced to me that she really, really crossed the line. And there’s no turning back.

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