Crap

 Don'tcha hate it when a friend turns to a stranger?

I had a really good male friend for four years, someone who I thought I could be a guy with.  Then at one point he tells me I'm beautiful.  Then I get a hard on for the sound of it and go all girly for like a week and tell my therapist how happy it makes me to be thought attractive by someone.  Then we have a brief (two letters, one zoom) flirtation, and then he gets involved with a woman and now he's cut me off.

I thought it was her.

It wasn't.  It was him.  And he actually showed her my letters without checking in with me first.  I would have let him

I believe I've suddenly appeared to him as a slut.  And now he's no longer my friend, after calling me his best friend.

On a day when Will is sleeping or pissing or incoherent.  On a day when I am low and the hours are long and I needed a friend and I lost one.

BUT, I didn't cut myself. I contacted my therapist.  And I texted him proof of his complicity when he started acting (like other men in my life) like he had nothing to do with it.

I'm so sad and angry.  

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That was yesterday, Saturday.  It's Sunday morning.  Still crying.

One of the reasons this has hurt so bad is because of the whole slut-shaming thing.  I believe my friend has fallen into stupid patriarchal thinking, of which I thought him incapable, that there is only one type of sex and that female sexual desire is dangerous.  

I feel like Job.  Yesterday was already a bad day.  I'd been missing Birdy so much.  Then when my friend called from the road, on his way to Bend, telling me he no longer wanted to see me, he couldn't see me as a friend now that the whisper of sex had passed between us, it was like someone had shot me up with radioactive salt.

Have you ever had that experience, on the xray table?  I once did.  I forget what it was for (my guts?  my back?) but I had to have some strange fluid pumped into my body first before the machine took its pictures.  For a few seconds my whole body felt locked into a low, hard cold flame.  That's how I felt yesterday.  I don't know what the neurotransmitter load was, but my whole body felt frozen into shakes.  My skin was hot then cold then like metal then like concrete.  My stomach hurt and my chest felt like a rock was pressing down on it.

Oh, well.  I was very angry in texts to my friend yesterday until at the end I forgave him.  I have to forgive him.  He can't help being a dick in this way.  He doesn't have the bandwidth.  After all, he's just had one woman, now a second in the offing and I've had many sexual experiences.  He's in love and love makes people stupid.  

And, as I was writing last week, I am insecurely and ambivalently attached which means that one of my core issues is a violent emotional reaction when someone leaves me.  I have a mental short-circuit that makes rejection feel like the other person is saying to me, "I'm sorry, I have to kill you now."  That is, abandonment raises an invisible background terror based on certain events in my toddlerhood.

The last time this happened to me was with a female friend in 2001.   She was a person I loved and to whom I thought I could say anything.  I was wrong.  She moved out of town and then wrote me a letter saying that I was "too much" for her and she ended our friendship.  Twenty years later and I still feel the hurt beneath that old scab.

Add to all this that I also found out this week, by going to a Christian writing conference online, that to get accepted by a publisher one has to have a "platform" and be a successful writer before one writes.  And that just made me tired.  So tired.  I can't do that.  I don't have the strength.  So I've decided just to write enough for a few friends to see if someone can understand me and accept me as I am.  Or will I lose ALL my friends once I tell my story?

OK.  It's now 6:15.  Will woke up, walked to the kitchen for a handful of hard candies, and has gone back to bed.  I said good morning, he said good morning.  He smiled.  I hugged him.  I asked if he was getting up.  He said, "I don't know."  I told him it wasn't even 5:30 and he should go back to  bed.

And here I sit, on the fucking floor over the fucking heat vent, thinking about how funny it is that my world has BEEN BROKEN once again.  That a reality, a friendship I had believed in and thought solid --

well, EVERYTHING SOLID MELTS INTO AIR.

fucking commies knew something