Reflections & Moving On

 

Property of Stormberry

Life is a constant flow of movement, where all kinds of elements enter, roll around and move out. This is the thing in which we live, we could say. For some of us, some characteristics are desirable and valuated, like "stability" and "dependability", but in the end we must get to terms with the fact that even though there are things that will accompany us through the most or the whole of our life journey, most of things will eventually fall out. And such is people and the emotions we tie to them.

There is someone - I doubt to say "in my life" because, really, how much in my life is he? - for whom I have always harbored marked feelings. Not always positive feelings, but feelings are feelings. With him I had always been in that situation where you feel you have strong feeling, but they are a mixed bag of "I like him" or "I enjoy his company" with "I can't stand him" or "why isn't he dropping dead?". Let me put it like this: do you know that kind of person that you would really like to like, but can't avoid disliking? Like, you really have good reasons to like them, and they have some features you consider just amazing, but at the same time they also have features you would never want around you? Yeah, that one.

Heads up, toxic and manipulative people are like that.

So, there's this person whom I know, who is like that, and whom I couldn't quite ever got to love nor managed quite to ignore, though that last part isn't all that so: I have been able to ignore him for long periods in my life, when we moved in different circles and didn't saw each other. Him not being there never meant a feeling of something missing. However him being there always meant a rolling thought in my mind.

We used to have long conversations, and there was a time when we exchanged e-mails, and I enjoyed them very much. But then, as we came closer and started talking more, things started cracking. I still enjoyed things of our exchanges, but then these cracks - in the form of lies piled on top of more lies - started building up and I found it harder and harder to muster love and care for him. Yet I still remained his friend, but I started the process of "closing doors".

I call "closing doors" the process of cutting topics out of a relationship. Imagine that every relationship in your life is like a house, and each room of that house is a topic of conversation or a topic of life. As the relationship progresses, you realize that there are certain topics that are problematic. What I do, is that I shut the door on that topic and no longer discus it with that person, and so a room in the house of the relationship is closed.

This happens and it's natural, I believe. It might even happen that some doors need to be closed and then, after a while, they can be tried again and slowly be visited and opened. It may also happen that in a relationship you go on closing and closing doors until you have basically closed the whole house, and when the house is closed, there's no real relationship.

This man and I actually would have a lot of rooms with doors open, or so I had thought for the longest of time, and why I held onto: he's one of those rare people with whom I potentially have nearly all doors open. But then came the lying. There were stupid, small lies, and then revisiting the past and retelling of facts, and things piled up and grew to a point where I remained standing, thinking if actually there were no rooms at all, because he had lied just about everything. And I mean everything.

Thankfully I have always doubted of him, and since I ran into him again some seven years ago, I made sure to google everything he told me (that could be googled), and I kept a record in my journal of some of the things he said, and later realized he was contradicting himself over and over with different versions of the same story or multiple denials of it. So, I can say I was warned by the way he relates to facts, the truth and the things he thinks he can tell me. And I have told him many times that I can tell when he lies - and mostly I could.

The shock came when I realized that some fundamental things that he was supposed to know (we are both economists) not only he didn't, but when I was correcting him (because I happen to have studied them particularly), he kept gaslighting me and denying my facts and insisting in the validity of his lies. This is when the bubble broke. Suddenly I was thinking of all the things he has said, which I just assumed to be true and that may have been false as well. That's when the house vanished into thin air.

In spite of everything, it is hard to move on. I will win nothing by calling him, shaking him and screaming in his face "what was the point of lying to me?", because no matter what he says, I can't no longer trust he would be telling the truth. Gods he lies about insignificant things, such as when he said that "you don't serve different types of meat in one meal". Really, he did say that, dead serious, like it was a known rule of etiquette. And I'm sure he has eaten bacon cheeseburgers and meatlover pizzas. And if he's so desirous to lie in such things, and has also lied about the books he claims to have read, the people he claims to have talked to and the things he allegedly knows, what else is he capable of lying about?

He's not the only one I have gone through a vanishing-house experience like this, nor will he be the most painful one, but it is painful nonetheless.

I still remember and I still cry thinking of my once best friend of 20 years, in whom I trusted so deeply, so blindly, only to find out that all had been a lie, only to have been a vehicle for her to embezzle another friend of mine.

It's always hard to move on, to let go someone from your life, but these things happen and we can survive them.