Serenity

Take my love, take my land,
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free,
You can't take the sky from me.

Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain't coming back.
Burn the land, boil the sea,
But you can't take the sky from me.

I'm trying desperately to keep my heart in check, and to stay calm. I'm angry, and I'm worried. The worry, however, is starting to outweigh the anger.

I have a "friend". For months we've undergone some extreme changes in our friendship. It's a combination of our personalities clashing and her doing some stupid, stupid things. To address the first one, I used to be more introverted than I am now. Because of some personal problems, high school was hard on me because romance wasn't really an option for my emotional state, and when it came knocking (as it inevitably does sometimes) I was emotionally fragile. She was a good friend for me because we were in the same drama group together, and she brought out a more outgoing side of me. I was a good friend for her because I was forgiving in the name of friendship, and I appreciated her hyperactivity and over-the-top attitude.

We met close to 4 years ago, in September 2005. And for those few years of high school, things were fine. I found her annoying, sure, but she still fit the qualities of a good friend and so I could hardly just stop. And, making matter more complicated, we were in the same performing arts group which made it quite impossible to effectively end a friendship on good terms. Over the last 8 months or so, though, cliche and lame as it sounds, I've become way more confident, something I lacked greatly in high school. And in that confidence I started to trust myself more. So when she would do something that bothered me--I realized it bothered me for a good reason.

Which brings me to the stupid, stupid things she's done. I could list it all out, but the most prominent ones are recent. The first is my previous blog. I mentioned before that it was intensely more personal than this one will probably ever be, and so because of that I took every precaution to keep TOO personal of information from falling into it. No names, no emails. I didn't even talk about where I was from, my friends' names. But because my school days were so long, I would sometimes update it when I was at school, back (and screen) facing the wall. A couple of times I saw her peeking from the corner of her eye at my screen. She'd done this before, with my deviantart account a month or two before -- she watched until I would go on it, then typed my screenname without looking directly at my screen into a word document and quickly saved and closed. I saw her do it and immediately went and closed my account down and created a new one later when she couldn't see, despite her promises not to go to it when I confronted her. So when I saw her peeking at my blog I carefully noted to her how personal and important it was to me. Having experienced a traumatic event I needed a place to be able to write about it, and because she knew about the event I assumed that she would understand my need for privacy and for her to leave me be. But still after that I witnessed her trying to find it multiple times. She would link me to blogs on xanga that she knew would interest me and wait. If I looked at her screen, I could see her discreetly refreshing in a new tab at the comments, waiting for my comments to show up--luckily I'd noticed her idea before I posted anything. At any rate, my blog picked up an anonymous user from my province using her Internet browser, and I blew up. She spent weeks going on and on about how it wasn't her.

I was googling things the other day when I was bored. Names of my family, my friends, just to see what came up. And I googled a good friend's nickname and a blog of hers came up. A couple of personal things did, actually...and while for a split second I wondered what was in them, I didn't bring the mouse anywhere near those links. I realized that I couldn't betray the trust we have and, even though she wouldn't know I'd been to it--I would. It brings me to the conclusion that this other "friend" of mine can't have valued me or our friendship that much if she was willing to go out of her way to lie to me and go around my back to do something like that.

When I googled this "friend"'s username to find her blog (she'd given hers to me willingly, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the provider she was using, so I googled it) and a different one came up, that I'd never seen. I went into it because something caught my attention in the preview. She'd made a blog posting with a single word in it--my username for that blog, a unique one I'd never used for anything else.

It's always little stuff like this, and she goes to the ends of the earth to blame me. In this situation, she was going on and on about how I needed to learn to trust her, about how I was wrong. But I was right. And it makes me wonder about how many other things she's sworn up and down that she's innocent of that she really wasn't.

Because, more recently, she knew I liked a mutual friend of ours. He was sweet and kind and funny. And so, of course, she slept with him. And then told him, afterwards, that I liked him.

Her excuse was that she didn't know I liked him. Then why did you tell him that I liked him? Oh, well I suspected that you liked him. Why would you tell him that I liked him if you weren't sure? Well I was pretty sure, I just didn't know 100%. Then why did you sleep with him.. ......You just need to learn to trust me, stop being so fucking judgemental!

So last night when she hung up on me when I confronted her about the blog I found last night, and when she continued to text me about how she is done with me and that she cannot see the reason in being friends with someone who makes her feel like shit for every single decision she makes, I just...Her undying repetition, her insistence that she's right, sometimes puts me on edge and makes me wonder if I really am right in this situation. And I have to look back and remind myself that I'm not being unreasonable. I never cared about her other decisions, just the ones that ended up screwing me over--and they got too common for me to handle over the past few months.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

<3 Love, Caitlin