I cannot prove one way or the other that Aada is actually reading. I just have my guesses depending on how comfortable I am with that thought; it changes by the day. As I told Michael, “I know I’m entitled to feel what I feel, but you get the vulnerable part of me that’s willing to admit that I even care what people think.” I’m brave to write about my life because it comes with an enormous amount of blowback.
How I deal with it is up to me. People are free to come and go from my life, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel lost at being entertaining to people as a writer, but not as a friend. That sometimes, there’s just nothing I can do to bridge a gap, and I need to let go.
The entries regarding Aada’s lies reveal some serious manipulation that I was not prepared to hear. Michael had to shake me into reality because I fought the truth tooth and nail.
No record? None?
Maybe you just can’t find it.
I was defensive, angry, and most of all, I hurt. I didn’t give Michael the time of day at first, because surely he couldn’t know my Aada, and she’d confirmed as much. That Michael knows nothing, and if he’s the person I want as my bellwether friend, go for it.
So on the one hand, I’ve got someone telling me that she’s a trained interrogator and field agent, and someone saying “no. She is not. She has been lying to you.”
“I will step away,” she replied. That was her answer for everything. Any disagreement at all and she turned away.
It was never about her “one little slip.” I saw that today and nearly came unglued. She lied to me for years about knowing someone she didn’t, and yelled at me when I wanted to talk about it more than one time. I told her to stop it, right now. That’s her boot on my neck.
In the end, I told her that I didn’t care what she did now, that she didn’t fit in with any of my other friends and wouldn’t even give them a chance. I don’t know why. She would have liked Bryn and come to tolerate Aaron (“perhaps Aaron can refrain from rolling his eyes”).
That’s an old, old line from 10 years ago when I told her that I couldn’t shut up about her.
Our new relationship energy could have lit New York for a month.
That feeling has never gone away, not for a day in 12 years. She lied to me and destroyed something precious, and still I’d give a limb to talk to her in person. We both spiraled out into something unhealthy, but there are too many great lines in our past not to write some more.
I just don’t think she’ll forgive me for what I know she’ll think of as embarrassing her and not me owning what I feel happened to me. As I have said before, maybe Aada is telling the truth and I chose the wrong friend.
I just highly doubt it because knowing Jonna was the lie that tripped her up. And instead of being angry at herself for lying to me, she was angry at me for writing about it. In my opinion, she’ll run as far away from me as she can get, because she will stick to her story that I’m the one who’s nuts. That I’m the most manipulative person she’s ever met. That I have somehow done her wrong by finding out that she pathologically lied as she saw consequences coming for me she did nothing to prevent.
She could have at least told me she lied in person. That would have at least prepared me for Michael lowering the boom and I would have continued to believe Aada over Michael until the end of my days. Because how could I ever have access to the databases that would tell me that my reality was fake?
How much did she need my adoration? The sad part is that she would have had it if she worked for a car wash. Her personality is that adorable and I’ve told her that from day one. That’s what makes this story so heartbreaking… She puffed herself up for no reason at all, and lost me in the process.
My journey with Aada has been different than her journey with me. She never had to deal with blossoming feelings of romance and having to be honest about it, then tripping over my own feet as I navigated feeling like shit about myself. It was then that I was the manipulator, when all my red flags hung out, waving proudly.
Aada gets a lot of credit for not holding me to my worst mistake, which is why I’ll always give her grace and comfort now.
I just won’t tolerate lies and will have a put up or shut up attitude toward what she does for a living. She doesn’t have to prove to me that she does what she does now, but she’ll have to untangle whether she lied or how.
I wore a CIA baseball cap like it was hers. That’s why I was destroyed when I lost it and a little too excited when I found it.
But I never wore two things with CIA on it at once because I didn’t want to look like I was pitching.
I just wanted her with me all the time, and that felt like it, as well as the Starbucks cup I bought with one particular gift certificate. The hat was stolen, but I still have the cup. Every time I drink from it, I think of the one who made it possible for me to have it.
This secretive bubble that she wanted was a place frozen in time, because we cannot go back to it. I have destroyed her web of lies in front of her face, and I’m sure the blood drained out.
But why wouldn’t I write about all of this when it is the absolute source of why I’ve been such a dick for so long? Literally no one else in my life mattered, so everyone could come and go and I didn’t notice. I gave up other relationships to make this one more secretive, because I couldn’t know that her swearing me to secrecy was bullshit.
It was the swearing me to secrecy that made Michael call bullshit and start hammering details. That he wanted to help me get well because he could see that Aada’s story was making me sicker… Both in that she wasn’t telling the right one and we were not checking the story we were telling ourselves.
Aada wrote that she was going to have to brace for the changes that were coming, and now I know what she meant. It was her cue to go into the wind, the only trace left being a few web stats that are guesses.
She says she’s glad she’s flying under the radar, that Michael knows nothing. We’ll see. I’m pulling for her because I don’t want to think that all of my worry and anxiety was based on a lie.
I was hospitalized twice and I cannot stress this enough. Being a psych ward patient at Methodist in Houston was a country club compared to being hospitalized in Baltimore. She didn’t come to visit either time. In all of her worry about me, she was never truly present. That would have been looking into my admittedly lazy eyes.
Something tells me that if we’d met in person, all of this would either be worse or I’d have moved onto writing about other things a long time ago. It was easier to write about Aada than my other friends because she allowed it. If we’d met in person, I would have believed that she saved the world many times over and I know that because I have until now. Michael thinks that’s why she lied… So that I would think she was a hero and adore her even more than I already did.
That would have been impossible.
Because it was the internet, it was closer than a heartbeat. Dings all day long between Facebook Messenger, email, and Signal. Little thrills because my super spy had time for me.
And when we were fighting, I’m sorry to Aada that I never put this together until today….. The noise ramped up my adrenaline the more we went back and forth, making it impossible to deescalate. We took each other off at the knees every time and it wasn’t necessary.
Basically, none of this would have happened if we’d had a happy relationship, and I bear just as much fault for the way it’s ended as Aada. That’s because relationships tumble and roll. When we were younger, it was my turn to be the villain in her story. Now, I don’t think of her as the villain, but when I write about problems in our relationship, she does.
I’m not trying to make her out to be a villain, just ignorant of the consequences she laid out for me.
And I cannot know whether she’ll ever contact me again because life is long. She’ll want time to heal, but even she doesn’t know what will happen after that. I promised to be her all the way to the river friend.
She never promised to be mine, I just assumed. I think I assumed correctly as long as I did what she said the first time without asking. To argue with her was absolutely pointless.
She would just get mad and walk off, leaving me to crumple in tears until the next time she had something funny to tell me, having forgotten about my tears or ignoring them… Take your pick because I’ll never know.
And that would start the in between, leaving our relationship frozen in time.
This fight feels different, though. It feels like no matter what I want, her opinion is going to win out in the end.
Because as she’s said many times, she doesn’t owe me anything.
Stories That Are All True 