I Wish I Never Met You

 

Hope It Gives You Hell

 Petty? Perhaps. But It Feels Right.

After what's been done, the lies that have been told, and the damage done to each other, all I can say at this point is that I really, really do hope I serve as a thorn in his side every time he has to come near my door or walk past my window. When he's parking, I hope there's a moment when he has to ask himself if I can see him and drives around some more to look for another option. I want to know that as much as he hates it, I'm on his mind every damned day, and I hope it's utter hell.

Jealousy Makes A Lousy Third

Part 2: How To Destroy A Friendship With Jealousy In Just 5 Easy Steps

My friendship with Cody began unexpectedly and with such a strong and surprising bond between us. The three months he spent living with me at the beginning of 2023 proved to be three of the best months I've had in all the years I've lived in Washington. We were inseparable. When Cody wasn't at work, he was with me. There were even mumblings from envious mutual acquaintances that I had some sort of sway over Cody to the point where they believed I kept him under my thumb and away from their individual company. 

The truth is that in the beginning, Cody honestly enjoyed spending his time with me. We talked, watched movies, exchanged stories from our troubled childhoods, and formed a truly great friendship. He was so fond of my company that after I'd helped him to move into his own apartment in my building just one floor up from me, he still chose to spend every night of that next month at my place instead of his.

I was happy to have someone so patient who actually seemed to get me. I hadn't felt heard, understood, or accepted by anyone in so long, that by the time Cody came into my life, I'd forgotten what a wonderful and powerful feeling that was. He bolstered my confidence, gave me someone to care for, and was kind and appreciative of the support I offered him. 

While he lived with me those first three months in 2023, Cody and I would co-host countless sex parties. We were cautious about how much 1-on-1 interaction we had, not wanting something as ridiculous as sex to interfere with the friendship we had built. So we invited in others to satisfy our needs while his boyfriend was locked up in California for probation violations. I would recruit guys from Grindr or Sniffies, run their pics and stats by Cody for his input, and invite them over if we were in agreement. It was a lot of fun, until it wasn't.

There began to be a pattern where the guys who came to join us in bed would focus all their attention on the younger, sexier Cody, leaving me feeling left out and unwanted. At first I let it slide, not wanting to make a stink of it by addressing it with Cody, but after the fourth or fifth time, I spoke to him and clued him in on what I was experiencing. The friends who I had been inviting over to play with Cody and me had begun to go behind my back directly to Cody to hang out and spend time, and some of them went so far as to expressly ask him to keep it secret. 

If there's one thing you should know about me, dear reader, it's that I don't do secrets very well. When I get a whiff of one, it's all I can think about. I'll scratch it and pick at it and rub it raw trying to uncover something that's being intentionally kept from me. And that's how I found out about these friends bypassing me to go and have alone time upstairs with Cody. 

I wrote him a letter letting him know that I was aware, and I told him how badly it hurt my feelings that he would participate in such clandestine rendezvous with friends he'd met because of me. I brought up how often I'd been feeling ignored and left out of the fun at our co-hosted parties, and I asked him if he might be willing to be more aware of the times when he felt me pulling away and try to circumvent me getting pulled into my head to overthink the situation by offering some reassurance.

He was hurt, feeling accused and blamed for the friends choosing to spend their time without me at his place. I assured Cody that I wasn't blaming him for their actions, and I apologized for failing to consider his own feelings about those friends and the possibility that he might have felt a kinship that had nothing to do with me. It was selfish of me to expect Cody to be my tether to the real world when I inevitably started to withdraw from activity that seemed exclusive of me. He wasn't to blame for being younger and having more appeal to these guys than I did. I felt awful for the jealousy I felt. It was humiliating.

And though he volunteered to be more vocal toward these guys when they began to focus all their attention on him, offering to speak up and remind them who had invited them to play, the task began to feel like a chore to him pretty quickly, and he ultimately came to resent the responsibility. And then, to really start the jealousy ball rolling, in came Skyler.

Skyler was a cheap hooker I'd hired about a year earlier who turned out to be a criminal and a manipulative, backstabbing thief. I was cautious of him, but when I found out that he and Cody had met and formed a close friendship, I welcomed him back into my life for Cody's sake. I didn't want to be seen as the mean old man who wouldn't let Cody have his friend over to play. So, when Skyler asked for help getting back to Seattle from Louisiana, I helped. I even let him stay with me when he got back, since Cody had moved upstairs by then.

When he arrived, there were a couple of nights of sex, first with just him and me, then with Cody. But from the start it was clear to me that there was a spark between them that I would not be able to compete with. They paired up, and without a word, suddenly Skyler was no longer staying with me as we'd discussed, but had opted to move in upstairs with Cody. They spent more and more time away from me, opting to party with Cody's growing circle of ne'er-do-well buddies.

It became difficult to get any alone time with Cody the way we'd spent the previous three months, just he and I. Anytime he came to see me, he had Skyler in tow, so there were conversations we couldn't have for lack of privacy. Part of me thinks that may have been by design, since having heartfelt conversations on the subject of feelings was low on the list of Cody's favorite things to do. And my jealousy grew more fierce and constant.

Not long after Skyler had entered the scene, I invited an out-of-towner named Lane, who was new to Seattle, to come over for sex. In keeping with tradition, I ran his info past Cody and asked if he would like to join in on the fun. In hindsight, I fully regret extending that invitation. Soon after Lane arrived and he and I had just begun to mess around, Cody showed up. The three of us had fun for a while, but I felt the familiar tug of attention being drawn away from me for longer and longer stints. I got in my head, and I tried to combat that by drinking more G. My plan backfired, and I passed out for two hours. 

That was enough time to cement what would become a burgeoning new friendship between Lane and Cody. They bonded and fucked and talked and fucked and bonded some more while I snored my face off in the other room. When I woke, they dressed and left to go up to Cody's place, where apparently Lane was going to be staying for a while. Apparently he had expressed some discomfort about the guy he had been squatting with expecting him to put out while he was staying there rent-free, so Cody, being the knight-in-shining-armor that he is, offered Lane his futon until he could find other arrangements.

It took close to three months for other arrangements to be found. And during those three months, the friendship I had forged with Cody grew more strained day by day because he was never available to do anything anymore with me, and when he did make an appearance, he always had Lane in tow behind him or Lane upstairs having a crisis, or Lane texting to say he'd been gay bashed by a group of trans girls, or Lane. . . you get the picture. Lane was a pathological liar and a master manipulator who instantly wormed his way in between Cody and me. Needless to say, I hated him for that.

Well, there you have the first two steps toward destroying a friendship with jealousy. Check back soon for steps three through five, and find out just how bad things got.

Be Careful With The Family You Choose

Part 1: How Inviting A Friend To Join My Google Family Ruined Everything

The Premise:

In late March 2023, while my new friend, whose name I should not mention for legal reasons -- let's call him Cody -- was living with me while he was trying to get back on his feet and find a home of his own, I thought it would be a nice demonstration of friendship and trust to add him to my Google Family. Adding him would give him shared access to certain folders and files on my Google Drive and allow him to control the IoT devices in my apartment linked to my Google account. So, I added him and sent him an invitation to alert him of it. 

The Confrontation:

Fast forward a few weeks, during which time there was no mention or acknowledgement of my invitation from Cody. I had completely forgotten about the whole thing until one afternoon in late April, following a series of very kind, appreciative text messages from Cody thanking me for being such a great friend, when he sent me a text message that contained just a screenshot of an email he had received showing him as a "Family Member (Limited Access)" on my Google Family account. I responded, recalling the invitation I'd sent, and asked if he was okay with my having added him. He responded in a fit of rage, asking me why I had added him and what made me think he would accept the invitation at all. 

Surprised and honestly bewildered by his unexpected anger over what I had considered to be a friendly, innocent gesture, I tried to assure him that I'd not done anything surreptitiously and was keeping nothing from him. I hadn't even fully grasped the extent of the accusation he had just hurled at me yet because I was so shocked to be suspected of violating Cody's trust. It just wasn't something that had ever occurred to me to do.

The Fight:

He continued screaming at me via text for a while, deaf to my protests and my explanations. It didn't help matters that he had been awake for several days, or that he had been hanging around with a low life who was notorious for hacking into people's networks and stealing identities. Cody was a ticking time bomb of paranoia, and he aimed the full force of that at me.

I was hurt by the accusation. To be doubted by someone in whom I had complete trust and in whom I thought I had instilled a mutual sense of understanding was a blow to the heart. I tried my hardest not to let my hurt feelings color the conversation, because I realized how vital this discussion was. 

I tried so hard to convince him to come and see me in person and not to force us to hash this out over text messaging. But when Cody is enraged, there's no reasoning with him. This was the first time I was seeing that side of him, and it was heartbreaking.

The Proof:

After some time had passed, I was able to retrace my steps in adding him and discovered a Google Help article that explained the process of adding a family member in greater detail. It turns out that when you add someone as a member of your family, Google does indeed send them an invitation to inform them they have been added, an invitation that must be accepted before its two-week expiration in order to make the addition of that family member final. 

But at the same time, when they are added, they show up in the Family group as a "Family Member (limited access)". This is the initial status that would have changed to simply "Family Member" had he or anyone else accepted the invitation before it expired. 

Cody simply hadn't seen the invitation when I sent it, and there's a very good chance he had deleted it or that it went to his junk mail folder. In any case, I thought I'd stumbled upon the perfect piece of evidence to show him once and for all that I had not violated his trust and was innocent of his accusation that I had hacked his network and gained access to his email account so that I could accept the invitation secretly on his behalf and delete it before he could see it. I took a screenshot of the help page and sent it to him.

He was not convinced. Despite what amounted to a completely unbiased and trustworthy piece of evidence directly from Google itself, he still held onto the suspicion that I had hacked him. And though he eventually dropped the matter and spoke of it no more, I would find out many months later that this encounter had distorted his perception of me and that every single thing I did from that point on was viewed by him through the fucked-up lens that he had crafted during this simple and innocent misunderstanding. 

It was, as I had predicted - the beginning of the end for our friendship. And despite the prophecy having sprung from my own message, I didn't see it coming until it was too late.

What Is The Point Of Being Good?

 The way I was raised by my grandparents was to live by the golden rule. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It seemed a pretty good way of living back then, where a small rural community stayed closely knit through family ties or church. I saw that rule pay off many times, too. My grandfather would help our neighbors pick their beans. In exchange, they would give us a bushel or two to take home. My grandmother was famous for her pies, which we distributed around the community now and then. In exchange for a chocolate silk pie, there was a lady who'd sit and shell those bushels of beans with her shelling machine and send us home with a few jars of her fig preserves as a bonus. People looked out for each other, and when we found ourselves in need, there was no shortage of help we could reach out for from our friends and neighbors. 

I have tried my best to follow that rule my whole life. When I've met someone in need of help, I've given it. If a new friend found himself down on his luck and facing homelessness, I gave him my bed instead, rent-free. I've fed the hungry. I've housed those without homes. I've always tried to put as much kindness and generosity out into the world around me, and there have always been people who've taken any and all support I had to offer. It made me feel good knowing that I was able to make someone's life a little easier, a little happier, or at least a little less sad. 

But there comes a point when I have to ask myself why I keep doing this for people who never seem willing or able to return the favor. In fact, there have been a couple who I poured so much love and support into that it left me reeling, yet when I needed some of that kindness or care or patience back, they called me needy. They pushed me away. They turned their backs on me. The most recent one even filed for a protective order because I wouldn't stop asking him to repay me over $1100 in loans and a down payment that he had agreed to repay to me but never did. 

For the last year, I've been unemployed. For the last 6 months, I haven't been receiving unemployment benefits. I'm unable to afford the basics, like rent, phone, or internet, and I'm fearful of stepping outside my apartment door for fear of running into him and being arrested because he is so very eager to see that happen. 

I think my grandparents prepared me to live in a world that no longer exists. They imbued me with values and beliefs that do not serve me well in this day and age. I give and give while these people take and take, and yet never does the good deed come back around. I've wasted 51 years being other people's door mat. I've helped everyone but myself. And now I'm too old to do much of anything about it. It's just pathetic how I've given my life away to people who couldn't care less if I live or die. I've wasted a life. This was all a huge waste. 

In the end, all I can say is that I was a good person. I don't think that actually wins me anything. I can't buy toilet paper or cat food with my good person badge. But it still feels important to me to be able to say that earnestly. I wish I'd chosen better people on whom to shower my love. And I wish that my love was enough to win me theirs in return. But I didn't and it wasn't, so fuck it. What a waste.