I feel I become a bitter woman when I see her hanging out with other girls that I don’t even know on her social media. That bitterness is a blend of many emotions. Resentment. Jealousy. A sense of betrayal— she created an illusion that I’m her only friend. Self-loathing— I am not needed and special — well maybe I never was. Cutting myself off from her news is my instinctive approach to handling such bitterness. I mute her stories and WeChat moment, my adopted way of withdrawing. The moment I realized what I was doing and feeling, I joked to myself: seems like I am withdrawing from a toxic relationship. Toxic. Sounds not unfamiliar. Over a year ago, Meng told me “didn’t you realize that your relationship with her is also toxic?” I was telling Meng that I just had a fierce argument with a friend because I was desperately trying to drag her out of a toxic relationship. That was the first time I realized maybe I bear a bit too much from this friendship.
She is an ardent texter. She loved to text me overly intimately, our chat history was soon flooded with intimate and personal conversations. I didn’t grow up in an environment where love and affection were abundantly expressed, so her words of intimacy became an allure, a way to fulfill my long overdue childhood needs. Besides, I am the kind of girl who’s always drawn to writing or literature stuff. She is artsy and sensitive whose writing often attracted me. Our relationship fervently evolved at a crazy pace. The online intimacy, however, evaporates swiftly offline. I feel estranged from her most of the time when we meet in person, from her being abnormally quiet to suddenly putting on earphones to zone out. It felt as though I had trapped myself in a virtual world of intimacy, convincing myself to ignore the offline alienation just to stay within it. Words and literature—they have the power to heal me. Yet, they can also be dangerous and deceptive. They are my Achilles’ heel.
It takes two to tango. I am aware of that. I must take accountability for this disaster. She appeared to me as a wounded lamb, while I cast myself in the role of her savior. Her talking about her past trauma during our first few meetings quickly narrowed our emotional distance. She liked to say that I am the only person who made her feel supported, that she needed me mightily. Jesus Christ, how was I able not to fall into that beautiful hallucination as someone who considered others’ dependence as a main source of self-validation? The savior and saint inside me were tremendously summoned, and I unconsciously positioned myself as her protector and giver. I saw her as a vulnerable and needy baby girl without subjectivity, which set a morbid tone for our relationship from the start. Despite the persistent, subtle discomfort—be it her chronic tardiness or her deep immersion in her phone during our time together—I never managed to express my dissatisfaction and frustration openly as I wouldn’t allow myself to blame an unprotected baby. I held up the resentment, convincing myself to let them dissolve: she didn’t mean to; she just has too many issues of her own; her heart came from the right place —— even though she’s a grownup at my age. She’s an adult, she’s opinionated. That’s the problem.
She is one of the most pessimistic people in my life and that evoked another vicious loop. Her negative perspective doesn’t get better, now matter how much I try to reassure her that she is loved or attempt to rationalize that the situation isn’t the end of the world. It feels I’m confronting a wall that only emits negativeness but absorbs zero positiveness. Ironically, this sense of powerlessness has not driven me to give up or walk away. On the contrary, it has heightened my perception of her as incorrigibly vulnerable and reinforced my savior complex. My body reacts when I revisit some of our past conversations, and at times I even feel frightened—how could I have put myself in that emotionally perilous situation?
I’ve often imagined having a fierce confrontation with her, just to lay everything out on the table. But I haven’t had the chance yet. As I write this, I feel a deep sadness, realizing I can’t even answer the fundamental questions of our relationship: How close are we, really? Does she love me? I remember once waking up to find her beside me, her face full of tears, while she never shared what had happened. This moment epitomizes my feelings about our relationship: she is close, yet she is also distant.