Sunday, August 3, 2008

Down into the rabbit hole

I have a Facebook account. I got it because Husband has one and a few friends had one. Mostly I abuse it for Scrabulous and it's successor, Wordscraper. My friends and I play against each other for shits and giggles.
But, I made a mistake. I didn't think that I'd end up finding myself down the rabbit hole of the past. I found old friends from high school. Most of which I wanted to find again. Some I wanted to tell how I felt about them and how I never had the courage to tell them when we were young that I thought they were amazing human beings. Others I just wanted to share a few good memories. One wanted to rehash a relationship he had with one of my high school best friends and what went terribly wrong with her. It was a little more painful to have to lay out this young woman's life in detail because I didn't know how to tell him that he was being played then and he still lets her play him now. I have no idea what became of her after the age of 19 when I cut her loose. I couldn't deal with her using people and expecting me to clean up her messes.
And from that man who is now in his 40s, married with kid, I find another friend who was a basket case. Her family life was sordid at best. She was unloved at home, as was her tortured psyche sibs, and desperate for attention. She was like one of those kittens or puppies at the animal adoption fair that is really trying to get your attention but seems to be just a little off. One of the last baby pets to be in the basket at the end of the fair and you adopt her then you find out that she's going to be the pet that isn't going to share you with anyone.
The story that says the most about her was one that I was told in high school from a friend. He was a year younger than me (she was a year older than me) and we were sitting around a camp fire on one of my yearly end of summer beach dos I threw. Don said that she had come on to him heavily when he was 15 and she 18. They had been at a party, drunk on cheap beer (Mickey's Wide Mouth I believe) and he had decided that if she wanted to have sex, so be it. So, they scampered off to her room where he started to have sex with her.
"She lay there like a board," he said, annoyed. "She just didn't want to be there."
So he got up and left her, unfinished. She said some things about him so in retaliation, he spray painted something unkind on the sidewalk in front of her house. A single word, quite blunt in his surmise of their few minutes of fumbling intimacy, that her parents took literally months to finally try to erase from their sidewalk.
It took me a half hour of thinking to decide if I wanted to admit her friendship on the arms length joys of Facebook. Right now, I've got a 'friend' on Facebook that hunted me down that I shared a post lay off class with who just never learned to get over his anger that he had been let go. He took it personally that he jumped on the tech bandwagon late in the game and didn't end up being a millionaire overnight. It never occurred to him that he was let go, as I was, along with 40K other people in our company. It can't be personal at that point. You're just a number to the leaders.
But in the case of this young woman that I shared 18 months of school with, there was more than annoyance at listening to tales of how screwed they got by a company. This woman had a rather complicated and tragic past (her youngest brother, adopted, reminded of it constantly by their distant parents, manufactured his version of his biological parents and when he finally hunted them down at 16 and found out that they were junkies, he came back to the only home he knew and took his own life). Would I find out after I had accepted her request for friendship now that we're in our 40s that she is still a broken human being?
I said yes.
She's still broken. New information poured in. She's still single. Recently re-singled. She has the classic sign of a single woman in her 40s: cats. Thankfully, she lives several states away so it will be tough for her to show up on our doorstep with a cat carrier or three to visit. Part of me wonders when she'll send me a note to say hello and ask about the high school best friend (that she also considered her best friend) that I cut loose at 19. Part of me wonders at what point am I going to have to find a cyber restraining order for her. Maybe I'll get lucky and she'll just send me pieces of flair.

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