bombs in bottles
The back of my house faces my back yard. At the back end of the yard is a row of white cedars, which were originally planted as a privacy screen. They've outgrown their usefulness, though, and now only threaten my roof and my neighbor's pergola. Today I removed a bunch of branches and the fence; tomorrow a tree company comes to take down the trees themselves.
Their timing is perfect and heavy. Four years ago Saturday, all my worst fears came true at once: my husband and I were in a motorcycle accident that killed him and left me at the mercy of medical teams for nearly a year. I spent a month in the hospital and then six more in my own spare bedroom, staring at those trees. Hating those trees. The trees embodied my helplessness, my grief, my rage.
See, my husband was supposed to take down those trees the spring of 2021. But he died. And I was stuck having to deal with them, and the neighbors, on my own. Only I was even more stuck in that bed, unable to walk, needing other people to make my food and clean my house and get me in and out of the shower. There was nothing I could do except stare at those trees and hate them for still standing when my husband and I were not.
I'm writing this while sitting on that same spare bed, staring at those trees. But I'm not here to talk about the trees.
Instead, I want to tell the story of how that accident - the one that cost me my husband, a year of my life, my ability to do any kind of impact exercise, and a significant chunk of my IQ - also cost me my best friend.
I have never made friends easily. But Y, as we'll call her (for "why did any of this happen?"), and I bonded easily over a shared niche research area during graduate school. We cemented the friendship by traveling to two conferences together within six months. When you can stand to travel with another person, share a hotel room with them, go a day or two without sleep, and listen to 500 variations on "this is more of a comment than a question...." without losing your minds, you know you get along.
We wrote together. We edited each other's work. We started a small business together. I helped her run errands and she pet-sitted my cats. Y knew more about me than my therapist. Y knew more about me than anyone except my husband.
I was married when we met; Y was in a long-term relationship. She broke up with that partner and married again sometime during our friendship, acquiring a stepkid along the way. I was there for all of it. She was there for me, through multiple moves and career changes, even through a three-week hospital stay that (finally) corrected a lifelong medical issue for me. Sure, she could be obtuse, off-putting, and stubborn, but so could I.
I genuinely thought I had a best friend. I genuinely thought she was family. When my husband died, she was the first person I called with the news.
My first month post-accident was spent in the hospital. Y did not come to see me, but it was because she couldn't. COVID restrictions were still in place, and I was only allowed two visitors on my list; for perhaps obvious reasons, I chose my dad and my mother in law.
In hindsight, the weirdness probably began while I was still in the hospital. It's just that it wasn't sufficiently different to her usual weirdness for me to catch on. Also, I was full of morphine and recovering from a brain injury. There's a lot about the hospital I don't remember.
It wasn't until I got home, in the months I spent bedridden post-hospital, that I really started to question our "friendship."
I couldn't articulate it at first. (I was still full of morphine, for one thing.) Y started getting both possessive and mean. She'd find little ways to demean or belittle me, especially in front of my home health aides, whom I still needed on account of the whole "I only have one working limb" thing.
She got gatekeepy and controlly, too. I'd tell her that I planned to see someone the next day, like my in-laws, and she would find excuses to stay around the house and "check on" me until I was so exhausted I had to cancel the visit. The first home health company had a nurse that did the same damn thing, so it took me a while (and coming off some of that morphine) to see the pattern.
I fired the home health aides - that's a whole separate story involving abuse reports filed with the state licensing board - but I wasn't sure how to bring up Y's behavior to her. She was exceptionally good at being "touchy" and at maneuvering so that she was the victim in any given scenario. I'd gotten so used to it over the years that I didn't really see it - or see it as a problem - at the time.
She made regular comments that could have been about us as friends, but that sounded an awful lot like "when we're dating" stories. She also made a lot of sexually explicit comments. She'd had a habit of doing that for years, which had always made me uncomfortable, but these were more personal and pointed. And then the emails started.
She sent me several emails linking to Google Docs. In the emails, she explained that this was stuff I needed to know if I was going to "be in a relationship" with her. At the time, I was confused and drug-addled, and I didn't know what on earth she was talking about, relationship-wise. So I didn't read them.
Most of all, I remember getting this odd...vibe. I described it to some friends later as "it's like she's decided there's a spouse-shaped hole in my life now and she can help herself to it."
I don't mean that she was trying to be helpful or supportive the way a spouse would. Y definitely was not trying to give me anything. Oh no. It was all take.
The "spouse-shaped hole" vibe was more like she'd decided that, since my husband was no longer around to benefit from all the "wife stuff" I did like take care of the house or pay half the bills or provide emotional support (or sex), Y could now help herself to those efforts. Like "oh, now that he's gone, I can have this stuff." Like everything I did as half of a marriage was an all-you-can-grab buffet, and she was just waiting for my husband to get out of the way so she could fill her own plate.
The more she prompted me to read those docs she sent, the less I wanted to do so. Meanwhile, she was still saying nasty things, finding excuses to spend days at a time in my house, and wedging herself between me and my parents, my in-laws, my friends, my physical therapists, and anyone else who might actually have my best interests in mind.
And then she talked me into ending my contract with my publisher. My second novel had recently come out. I don't know if she couldn't stand the thought of me succeeding where she was failing (she hadn't published in years), or if this was another attempt to cut me off from people who might have provided some perspective on the situation, or what. But she did.
I'm still ashamed of the email I sent my publisher. I'm still ashamed that I let her talk me into that. I take responsibility for having written and sent that email - I've apologized to my editor, at least, and we're on decent professional terms again. I may even re-release the novels at some point, not that they were any good. But even in my morphine-addled state, I could tell that Y had overstepped her bounds. She'd manipulated me into doing something that was directly opposed to my best interests, and that was an obvious problem.
I cut her off as soon as I was cleared to live on my own. She texted me once to ask about picking up some gardening supplies that were in my garage. I didn't answer. I hadn't had time to see what was in that pile (my dad had brought it up from the basement, which I still couldn't access on account of not being able to walk yet), and I wanted to see it before anyone took it. I assumed that, like a reasonable person, Y wouldn't stop by if she didn't have permission.
And technically, she didn't - she sent her wife instead. Y did not inform her wife that I hadn't cleared the pickup. As a result, her wife ended up taking a bunch of stuff I hadn't given anyone permission to take. None of it was expensive, and it's not worth chasing down, but I haven't forgotten how Y end-ran me on that.
I saw Y exactly one more time, at my husband's memorial service. She commandeered the mic to tell a story about the one time my husband gave her a lift on his motorcycle (you know, the one that killed him), featuring a detailed discussion of the ride's effects on her genitalia. To 300 of his family, friends, colleagues, and high school students.
Yeah.
By the way: After I stopped answering her texts, she never reached out to me directly or through her wife or any mutual friends. There was no "haven't heard from you in a while, hope you're doing okay." No "did I do something wrong?" No "can we talk?" None of the things one would expect an actual friend to say after the sudden radio silence of a "best friend" who, let's be real, had a lot of reasons to consider offing myself at the time. (I didn't, but I had a lot of reasons to.)
I haven't seen, spoken to, or looked in on Y's social media (if it still exists) since. A mutual friend confirmed my "wife stuff" vibes sometime later, saying that Y had spent those months of my convalescence telling Mutual that Y and I were "going to date" and getting excited about moving in with me (!). (Remember that Y had a wife through all this, and I presume still does - though maybe I shouldn't presume that, if Y treats her wife anything like she treated me.)
I also asked Mutual to read the docs emails Y sent me. Mutual read them but declined to provide any details, just saying "they're basically a sex manual," "I knew she was weird about sex but like...not like this," and "I'm never reading anything for you again." I'm pretty sure that last one was not a joke.
As is perhaps obvious, I'm still trying to figure all this out, four years later.
I thought I had a best friend. Now, I think maybe I never did. So what did I miss for five years? I've been a victim of an abusive relationship before - was this so much like that I just didn't see it for what it was? How did I extricate myself from that relationship and correctly identify it as abusive, but I totally missed this one? Was I just that desperate for a friend? Why did my husband never say anything? Is there something wrong with me?
After four years, I've rejected the "there's something wrong with me" hypothesis. I'm not the one who ruined our friendship. I genuinely believed I had a best friend. Y was the one who decided to take advantage of me when I was at my lowest and most vulnerable (ever).
And I'm pretty damn sure I'll see this coming should it ever happen again with anyone else. The accident may have broken a lot of my other bones, but it also grew me a spine.
Still. In hindsight...that was fucked up. And I'm sad. I lost my husband, but my best friend? Never existed at all.
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