How A Birthday Betrayal Broke Reality In Two
A Tale Of Two Birthdays
Mine (June 2023)
A recent revelation landed in my lap like a 500-lb anvil this weekend. For over two years, I have pondered how a person who called himself a friend and said the words, "Love you.", when he left for work in the mornings, could have allowed a day as momentous as my 50th birthday to pass without even a single text message, phone call, or visit.
For the month leading up to it, I'd talked about it with him at least a dozen times, telling him how important it was to me and how I'd never expected to see such a milestone come to pass in my life. And he was, after all, just 40 feet away, one floor above me the entire time.
I questioned how he had justified allowing me to sit in tears on that special day, depressed, alone, and feeling so unwanted and unimportant that my thoughts turned dark and ready for the pain to end. If the situation had been reversed and it was his birthday, you can believe I would be there with a cake, a card, and some gifts to celebrate with Friend, because that is what friends do, especially when they live 40 feet apart in the same building. I never could figure it out. . .
. . .Until this weekend, when the explanation was uncovered unexpectedly. It turns out that on that very special day, Friend was in his apartment listening to a pair of strangers fill his head with such unbelievable lies about me being a murderer, a terrorist, and under federal investigation by at least three different agencies.
I couldn't believe the preposterous words coming out of their mouths, and I certainly thought the next thing I would hear would be Friend laughing at them as he ushered them out of the building in disbelief. Instead, what I heard was that friend immediately swallowing their made up history for me like he'd suspected it all along.
This man had lived with me for three months in my small one-bedroom apartment. We had become inseparable for some time, fast friends, a team. Even after I'd helped him move out of my bedroom and into a unit one floor above me, Friend was back at my place every night after work, staying the night for another month instead of going up to his own bed.
He was there for me when I had to put down my beloved cat, Moriarty, offering me his sympathy and support while my heart was breaking. We were so tight that other acquaintances started complaining that he was always with me and never free to go do things with them apart from me. And that was his choice. The man knew me better than just about any other person I can think of, or at least I thought he did.
But if he'd really known me, really absorbed my truest nature and felt the kinship with me that I did with him, he wouldn't have stood in that upstairs apartment shouting and screaming, "Oh my GOD!", in response to each more incredible allegation these two people offered him, sounding as if he'd been wearing wool over his eyes the whole time we had known one another only to have it removed that day to reveal the real monster they were describing.
These lies were so crazy that anyone who has ever met me, ever spent a day with me, would know that they could not possibly be true. And if Friend had bothered to speak to me about any of it, or even to approach just one person out of the hundreds of available people that have known me my entire life, he could have been relieved of these laughable delusions once and for all.
But Friend treated any contradiction as an attack and dismissed anything that didn’t fit his view. He had begun to grow suspicious of me after trying to connect dots from completely different pages out of completely different books. I recently learned that he has a belief loop that only let in confirming facts, and when he felt criticized or embarrassed, he rewrote details to protect himself and his image.
If any of those feelings threaten to jump out at him based on what he says or does to people, his psyche goes to work blurring any incoming information that might contradict his perception that he is not an asshole. It rewrites reality in real time, forgetting specific details that don't support this infallible image of self, and only accepting evidence that aligns with his already strongly held beliefs about a person, place, or thing.
It relies on a complicated mixture of confirmation bias, double standards, insecurity, projection, lack of empathy and understanding, and emotional immaturity, and it's one hell of a tough cookie to crumble. You can't logic your way past this kind of delusion.
The only way to change his mind is if he finds his own way there, slowly cultivating new beliefs that over time may eventually reveal the truth he was denying. But brute force won't do it. Think of cults. It's like trying to explain to one of those guys that the Kool-Aid is a bad idea.
The following weekend was his birthday. Despite some huffing and puffing and a bit of asshole-ish behavior, I managed to convince him to allow me to bring him a birthday cake, a card, and some gifts. Because, you know, he was my friend, and I lived just 40 feet away, one floor down.
He didn't behave like someone who had just discovered he'd been living with a murderer. There was no sign of him being afraid of me or anything. All I saw was his usual levels of impatience, intolerance, and simmering irritation, which had sort of become his default where I was concerned.
But no indication anything had changed between us. He accepted the gifts, of course, and the cake. Later on, I had to ask him if he'd seen the card I'd made, and he eventually responded that he had and that it was cute.
Summer of Silence
(July 2023)
Walking on eggshells had been my preferred mode of perambulation, as for some time, anything I said or did, whether it as texting him hours after he'd told me he would be right down, or reminding him to move his car from the illegal spot he'd parked in before parking enforcement popped another ticket under the wiper, pissed him off.
He had developed a certain tone in his voice when answering a call from me that I referred to as a mix of impatience, anger, and frustration curled into a sharp staccato. Before I even spoke or had a chance to provide some context for my call, he had started answering me with the tone. I wonder if he ever stopped to consider that being spoken to like you are a nuisance over and over again can make you start to think that anything you say is going to be irritating. It feels like being in never-ending trouble.
Even eggshells turned out to be too annoying a conveyance for him, and by morning the next day, I'd been exiled. Blocked. Stonewalled. Silenced. There are basically three ways Friend handled conflict and emotionally dense situations.
- He either avoided it, choosing when, how long, and about what we would talk;
- He might erupt into a fearsome tantrum loud enough to shake the walls, substituting volume for whatever proof or truth his argument lacked; or
- He would simply shut you out, shut you down, and put an end to your access to his friendship.
This was one of that third variety, and I managed to land there before he had even managed to eat his delicious 35th birthday cake.
My exile lasted through the full month of July and halfway into August. It so happened he had borrowed $50 from me at the beginning of June before he joined Team Terrorist, and none of my efforts to recover that money had been successful. I decided after a month and a half of his evasion, both of me and of the debt, I would file a small claims case in King County District Court.
Before I went down that road, though, I wanted to give him a heads up, warn him that I would be filing the following morning if I didn't hear from him by 8:00 AM, and give him one more chance to take responsibility and repay me, in which case we wouldn't have to drag our friendship through a courtroom. So I put a note to that effect on his door and went to bed.
Strangers In The Night
(August 2023)
Around 3:00 AM that night, while I was sleeping, I heard my phone ring beside the bed. It was Friend's ringtone, which I had not heard in so long, it woke me when it rang. I missed the call, but dialed it right back, and when he answered, he didn't have "the tone". He sounded tired. Maybe a little down in the dumps. Defeated, almost.
He asked me if I would like to join him outside the building on the sidewalk outside my windows for a smoke and a chat, and I jumped out of bed, dressed, and hurried outside to find him leaning against the wall, a half-smoked Marlboro between his fingers while he chewed at the nail of a finger on the other hand.
I said hello. He returned my greeting. He seemed unexpectedly calm for someone who had been so unreasonably furious with me the last time we spoke. He told me he didn't want me to go file my suit. It would be a waste of money, he said, and he had every intention of repaying me the $50.
He explained that it had been a particularly rough summer for him financially due to repeated issues with his cars breaking down, being towed or impounded, and basically being unreliable to get him to and from work, which he had been trying to do as much of so he could catch up.
I told him I completely understood and added that what he had just told me would have been all I needed to hear to put the matter to rest before I had to consider legal action. He conceded that he should have been better about communicating with me and apologized.
He stayed outside with me while I smoked a second cigarette, telling me more about his summer. He announced that he and Boyfriend had become official on July 4, a couple days after my exile. I congratulated him. He told me he'd had some bad news the day after they became boyfriends, and I immediately hugged him, fighting back tears, not wanting to spook him by showing to much emotion, and he returned the hug. We stood there for half a minute in that embrace, silently speaking so many things without a word.
Just then, Boyfriend came around the corner of the building looking for him, obviously perturbed. Friend told him his phone was on silent, so he hadn't heard any of the ten phone calls Boyfriend had made trying to track him down. He told Boyfriend we were almost done, and Boyfriend retreated back inside looking a bit disgruntled.
I stamped out my cigarette and asked him if he minded letting me back in through the gate I'd come through, because in my haste to meet him, I'd run out of my apartment without my keys. He unlocked the gate, then the door, and we walked inside together. Before we each turned to go our separate ways he reached for another hug, and I was so relieved to return it.
I told him I had really missed him, and he said the same. Still no sign of the rabid man who'd been sipping all that haterade on my birthday. I was completely oblivious that any of that nonsense ever happened thanks to his stellar performance in the role of remorseful friend.
The Delicate Road To Reconciliation
(August 2023)
A week or so later, I ran into him outside on my way to buy smokes, and I asked him if he might consider coming by my apartment for a visit when he was free. He was running an errand, but said, yes, he could do that. When he showed up, there was still no tone. I got a hopeful sense things might be salvageable between us.
I asked him point blank if he would be open to trying a reboot of our friendship and working on a real reconciliation after the difficulties we had faced months earlier when it all fell apart. He agreed, but said he would only consider doing so if I promised not to push things too fast. I agreed, but I had no idea what his measure of "too fast" was going to be.
We hung out every day that week, at least for an hour or two, usually until Boyfriend was done doing whatever he did, and then he'd say good night. Wanting to be sure I understood the major points I'd gotten wrong in our previous version of friendship, I kept asking him questions about them, trying to get a clearer picture of his perspective and understand what I might have done differently.
He cautiously played along for the first few days, surrendering to my plea for open dialogue and clarification of our problems, but we quickly hit a wall. He told me on the fourth day that he didn't want to revisit some of the things he had said to me when we parted ways, telling me I shouldn't dwell on the past, just let it go and move forward trying to stay in the moment.
I wanted to agree to that, but there were some rather harsh statements he'd made that I felt were based on misunderstanding or misinterpretation of things that had prompted particular breakdowns in communication between us. I told him it was easier for him to move on without talking about those things because he wasn't left feeling misunderstood or unfairly treated, hadn't been left with unanswered questions that he felt were critical for the friendship to move forward.
Nope. Not gonna do it. And if I insisted, I was pushing things too fast. So I quickly came to heel, picking up on the unspoken threat that it was his way or the highway. And still, even with this new blatant streak of undisguised avoidance coloring our relationship, there was no indication that the time he spent away from me he was working with investigators and trying to help them surveil me and gather evidence of god knows what so they could eventually arrest me. Nothing in his demeanor even hinted that such a cruel and nefarious scheme was underway behind my back.
Car Troubles
(September 2023)
Early September, he approached me with a proposition that I use the money I had gotten from cashing out my pension after losing my job at the end of June. He suggested I pay him $1200 plus the cost of repairs for his Chevy Cruze, which needed a new battery, a replacement for the front tire, and some electrical work under the hood to get it running.
He figured the repairs would come to no more than another $500 or so, and he said he would even be find lowering the price to $1,000 plus repairs and call it done. He asked for a $1,000 down payment so that he could reserve a used car he wanted to buy for himself since his vehicles had been so troublesome over the summer.
I told him before we moved forward that I was very nervous about entering into a private automobile sale and mixing a sizeable sum of money with friendship. I told him I would only do it if he promised me that nothing about the transaction would end up doing damage to us as friends.
He agreed, and I sent him the down payment. He told me he was off work a couple days later and would start the title transfer then, and that we would go and get the car towed from where it was parked in West Seattle to the service department at the Chevy dealership to get an estimate for the repair work.
But once that money hit his Cash App account, something changed. He became less responsive to my texts. He broke his promise to work on the title transfer that Thursday as he'd said he would do, and he kept ignoring my messages asking when we were going to get the car to the dealership. Days passed A week. He had been short with me a few times following multiple texts I'd sent trying to get my questions answered.
Selective Reading
(September 2023)
He snapped at me the evening we were going to pick up his previous boyfriend (we'll call him Ex) at the airport, who had just been released from jail after nearly a year. I'd asked him three-and-a-half hours earlier if I could ride with him to pick up Ex, or if he already had a copilot. No response.
An hour before time to leave, I sent a follow up, explaining that it was no big deal if he already had a car full. I could catch up with him later if that was the case. No response.
Half an hour before. No response.
Five minutes before time to go, and I got a text simply saying, "I'm about to leave in a few.", completely ignoring my outstanding question about whether I could go. So, I asked him again, "Are you going alone, or do you have someone going with?"
I figured since I'd responded to his message in under a minute, chances were good he still had his phone in hand and would continue to be responsive. But when no reply came for another 6 minutes, I thought that was roughly the equivalent of "a few", so I messaged back, "Never mind. You must have too many things going on already. I'll see him when I see him. Drive safe."
A minute later, an angry text came through. "I'm trying to get ready. Damn!", then, "Don't start being like that." I recognized the warning. Another reminder that pushing too hard for that easy breezy friendship to come back would get me kicked out again. But it felt unfair to be scolded and lectured when my question about going along had gone completely ignored for over four hours, leaving me to guess at the last minute if I should get ready to leave.
So I messaged back, "Be like what, Friend? I asked about going three-and-a-half hours before it was time to go. Then I followed up an hour before and again half an hour before. You chose to respond 5 minutes before leaving with no answer to my question, just a deadline. So, if I come across as somewhat frustrated with you, I'm sure you can understand why."
Another couple of minutes ticked by without a reply, and then came an angry knock at my door. I opened it, ready for the yelling this time, and he didn't disappoint. "Why do you always end up doing this? I was trying to get ready, Shannon!"
I scrolled back through our conversation, showing him all of the messages he had failed to answer going back nearly four hours. He looked at my phone, then at his, and his fire cooled immediately. He said, you're right. I sent my response to the wrong person. My bad."
And that was that. No apology. No acknowledgement that this was just one example of an occurrence that happens almost daily. I attempt to get information I need in order to plan my day or to ready my agoraphobic ass to venture out, which is stressful and is made less so if I can plan it out beforehand. He doesn't take those things into consideration, you see.
From his perspective, my multiple messages were an assault on his senses, a grab for control over the conversation, an invasion of his privacy, or a manipulation of some sort. Anytime his autonomy, privacy, or his assumption of being right are perceived to be in jeopardy of being taken from him, there's no room left to consider the impact his actions or inactions might have caused other people.
He completely focuses on preserving control and regaining the upper hand. Don't I deserve the luxury of knowing whether I should prepare myself for a ride-along as much as he deserves the luxury of having to read the smallest number of messages possible? Where was the fairness in that friendship? Well, now I know - it died the day I turned 50, and nobody bothered to tell me.
We fought again later that night, landing me back in Camp Stonewall for several weeks, the car issue still not resolved. Weeks went by with no response from Friend. I created burner numbers, trying to make contact so I could learn what he intended to do about the car sale. A few more days go by, and I happen to see him drive up to our building in his new car. Still no response about the one I was already $1,000 in the hole for.
Storage Wars
(October 2023)
Since the mountain wouldn't come to Mohammed, Mohammed decided to tackle two birds with one stone in a burning bush. (I may have mixed my metaphors there.) I had rented a storage unit at his place of business while they were having a sale, and I had a bunch of stuff I'd stacked up to take there for storage. So I rented a Zip car and took my stuff to my storage unit, planning to make a quick stop by the office to ask him for a meet up at my place after he got off work for us to discuss the car situation.
When I arrived, my code for entry to the property was not working, so I had to ask him to grant me access. The look of cold fury on his face at seeing me arrive should have been all the indication I needed to know that this person was not my friend. He looked like he wanted to absolutely murder me on sight.
But I remained professional and calm and went about my business, first inspecting my new unit then deciding it was too small for all the stuff I had brought with me to store. I went to the office and in a friendly manner simply asked if he would please come by my apartment after work so we could talk about the car. He gave me a non-committal reply that I took as acceptance, and I left and returned home.
Three days later, I reached out using a burner number he hadn't yet blocked to ask that he unblock my number so we could communicate. After an initial bit of grumbling, he eventually said he had complied, but messages still went unanswered. He warned me not to take our personal business to his job, which I agreed not to do. He perceived everything I said as a threat, and he was very guarded and wary of me - the first true indications of his actual state of mind.
Still, I had no idea his trepidation was the result of his being of the opinion I was a terrorist. I thought he was just being his usual grouchy self where I was concerned and decided to look past it and keep my eyes on the goal, which at that point was simply to finish with the car sale and be done with him once and for all.
We finally got the estimate back from the dealership, but it was six times the amount he had said we should expect at the outset of the transaction. There was no way I was sinking $3,000 into his used, non-working piece-of-shit Chevy Cruze, so we talked about it on October 17, 2023, and he and I agreed together to terminate the sale of the car.
He agreed he would repay me the down payment, but he told me he no longer had the money on hand as he had used it to purchase his new vehicle. Not wanting to put him in further financial hardship, I offered him the option of repaying me in small increments, which he agreed to do. I asked him to come up with a repayment schedule he felt he could afford to stick to and to let me know what it was when he was done.
Well, that's how October 17th went down from my perspective. Turns out that behind the scenes, there was a thermonuclear meltdown going on upstairs where my friend informed the rest of the building of his intent to never give me a cent of that money back. He was so furious about my having come to the storage unit that his tantrum was beyond belief. He bragged about having gained access to one of my backup gmail accounts and all the other apps I had attached to it, like my back up Grindr, my Google Drive and Photos accounts, etc., which is wild, because that was essentially him confessing to a serious violation of both federal and state criminal law, not to mention civil law violations I can now sue him for.
Days went by without further word from Friend. He skipped work the next couple of days, and after worry set in on my part, I checked with Boyfriend to find out if he had perhaps overslept and missed work. Boyfriend told me that my friend had been sick. Later that evening, Friend showed up at my door to tell me he'd had terrible diarrhea for the last couple of days and had not left his bed except to explode into the toilet every few minutes.
Too much information. And quite probably a lie.
I recently learned that on the 19th of October that year, Friend was made aware that the allegations he had originally been fed back in June had not panned out in the investigation. It was becoming clear to investigators that their initial claims that I was a murderer and a terrorist were not accurate.
This put Friend in a particularly hairy predicament. Suddenly he realized how poorly he had treated me and how much damage our relationship had suffered because of it. He flew into a furious rage, spectacular even by his standard for tantrums, and accused the investigative team of using him, of lying to him, of destroying our relationship and my reputation over false charges.
He reminded them they had bullied him into believing I was dangerous, that I had killed people, and that I could not be trusted. And they reminded him that he had been instructed to keep up appearances, but that didn't happen either.
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| AI generated video depicting possible scene from October 17, 2023. |
In a ballsy move meant to save face and prevent their fruitless investigation from being made known to me by Friend, and then likely to the public by me, an investigator told him they hadn’t tied me to the terrorism case but might pursue lesser offenses and could scrutinize his role. That, in my view, explains the sudden shift. This seems to have kept Friend from coming to me with the truth, and it explains what came next.
On the 22nd of October, he texted to ask me if I had any homemade chili left, which I'd offered to him earlier in the day. I told him there was some left and welcomed him to come and have some. A couple hours later, he (and Boyfriend) showed up at my apartment looking worse for the wear (from stress, not norovirus), and I fed them the last two bowls of chili I had.
I also put together a bag of groceries and medicine to help nurse them back to health and even made a custom pop-up card that had a fun little Norovirus theme to it. It included instructions for getting better, staying hydrated, eating bland foods, and getting plenty of rest. I took it to them, and they thanked me.
That night, I was fed up with being flaked on and ignored. So, I took Friend another gift I'd made him, a framed 3-D piece of artwork from Alice in Wonderland with a quote I knew he'd love about all those who wander not being lost written on the back of the frame.
With it, I gave a letter telling him it was the last day, noting how he had broken every promise and commitment he'd made to me since they were over to eat my chili, and that I'd had enough of that kind of disrespect from him. That was the last day I intended to take it.
For a solid week, he had told me every day that he would come talk to me about the proposed repayment schedule he promised to work on, and every day he flaked on me, wasting hours and hours of my time without so much as a text message asking to reschedule or informing me he couldn't make it.
I reached the end of the patience that being his friend had afforded him. So, I stopped acting like a friend and started acting like a debt collector.
Collections Agent
(November 2023)
The next day, November 1, I gave him a loan statement with a repayment schedule I had come up with myself in absence of the one he failed to provide, leaving it attached to his door. Hours later I discovered it shredded, still in its envelope, on the floor in the hallway outside my door.
Ex, who was living with him at the time, had delivered the shredded correspondence to its resting place in the hallway. So I mailed a copy of it to Friend, indicating that if Ex tampered with it this time, he could expect to face federal mail tampering charges and perhaps spend another Christmas locked up in jail. The letter was returned unopened to my mailbox a few days later.
I then printed it one last time, took it upstairs, and taped the open statement to his door where I knew he had to look at it to remove it. He did see it. It was in his hand when he stomped angrily down the ramp and through the first floor hallway up to my door, where he banged furiously until I answered. He shoved the statement in my face and shouted at me not to put anything else on his door.
I asked him again in a calm voice if he would be making payments per the included repayment schedule I had generously offered him, and he just hurled more insults, a fat comment or two, and several curse words at me as he retreated back to his apartment just 40 feet away, one floor up.
That night, irritated by his refusal to take responsibility for his debt or apologize for his weeks of avoidance and disrespect, I acted in a shameful manner, letting my anger drive my actions. I scattered dozens of small, ticket-shaped flyers advertising Friend's debt to me around our building and at work. It was my way of provoking a response that I felt he owed me regarding his debt. I knew it would embarrass him, and I was right.
I regret it, not just because of the war he has waged against me afterward, but for the simple fact that it was a childish and hurtful thing to do to someone. But I never got a chance to apologize to him for it or to explain why I had been pushed to such an action in the first place.
He called the police. After their visit, I resolved to limit my contact with him to lawful collections letters and the legal action I had pending in small claims court.
Because the court was still handling a huge backlog of cases from the pandemic, they were not able to issue me a date for our pre-trial hearing, which meant I couldn't serve him the notice of small claim against him.
In the meantime, I was advised to send him the official loan statement as a demand letter, indicating what each loan and down payment was for, what I had done to try and collect, and what his response, if any, had been.
I mailed it to him by certified mail at his home and at work. The next day, I mailed a letter to Boyfriend, begging for his assistance with finding a neutral third-party who could act as mediator and help us resolve the financial dispute outside of court. Boyfriend, unsurprisingly, opted to ignore my request for his help.
The Christmas Spirit
(December 2023)
So I stopped trying and was waiting for the court to schedule a date for our initial hearing. Then came Christmas day. Nostalgia set in, and I felt badly for having aired Friend's dirty debt laundry all over our building and at his job. I made a beautiful portrait of him and Boyfriend as a gift for them for Christmas.
While they were making frequent, noisy trips down to the laundry room across from my apartment that night, I set the gift out in a gift bag in the hallway where they would see it next time they came downstairs.
I suppose the first trip they noticed it, the gift was still too close to my door, so they looked at it from afar, but opted to leave it alone and go about their business with the mountain of dirty laundry they'd brought downstairs to wash.
So I moved the gift bag to a spot on the floor right outside the laundry room where it was a safe distance away from my apartment. He picked it up on the next trip and then took it back upstairs with him on his way back. A while later, there came a knock at my door. I opened it to find Friend standing there with a piece of paper in hand. I greeted him, and he handed me the paper, which was a hastily printed Christmas scene with two names scribbled in ink off to the side of the little printed fireplace.
He (and Boyfriend in shaky handwriting) thanked me for the beautiful gift. He told me he wanted to hand me the card himself instead of leaving it outside my door so he could thank me in person for such a thoughtful and kind gift for Christmas. I thanked him for the card and for bringing it himself, and he turned to rejoin his harem waiting timidly at the entrance to the laundry room.
I took the calm and peaceful interaction as a sign there was still hope for us to resolve the dispute outside of court, and so I sent him a text on another burner number asking if he might allow us to sit down and talk about the repayment he'd promised. No response. Fearing he had just ignored the new number, I printed a small note with the same message the next day and taped it to his mailbox.
That evening, he texted me back saying, "Yes, I'm pretty sure we could have a talk." I thanked him for responding and for his willingness to talk with me, and I asked if he could give me an idea as to when he might be willing to sit down with me. I told him that I knew the subject of the money he owed had probably not featured highly on his day-to-day list of things to focus on, but explained that it had been my sole focus the last two months while I tightened my belt from hunger and poverty.
He responded saying he needed some time to gather his thoughts and his emotions before he could sit down and face me, failing to make any kind of commitment to a time or date. I asked if he knew how much time he might need, citing past experience that had shown that if a date and time wasn't set on a calendar, chances were it wasn't going to happen. He didn't respond.
I had made two beautiful cards commemorating our friendship which encapsulated some of the memories we'd made during our time together as friends. They were bittersweet reminders that while our friendship had indeed come to an end, there were good times to be remembered.
In one of the cards, I included a number of photos from our time together, which included a photo of my cat, Moriarty, several cakes I'd made for him, a picture of him asleep in his Amazon uniform with my other cat, Iago, tucked under his arm on my couch, and a picture I'd taken (with his explicit consent) of him and one of our casual sex partners, where the two of them lay naked on my bed with Friend feeding grapes to the other guy like in one of those scenes of ancient Rome.
My intention, as I said, was simply to include photos of some of the good and meaningful times we shared as friends. That isn't how he took it when I left the cards for him outside his door later that night.
At around 4:40 AM on December 27, I received a text message while I slept accusing me of playing games, saying he'd actually believed I was being sincere and that my gift had been a genuine act of kindness (I was, and so was it), but that now he saw I was just playing games.
When I woke around 7:30 that morning, I read his text and was completely taken off guard by the anger it conveyed. I didn't understand what he could possibly have been offended by in those cards. They were meant to inspire some nostalgia, but apparently they caused him to flip his lid.
I texted him back, asking him to explain what was wrong with the cards. Why was he so mad about them? His only reply, and the last thing he ever said to me, was, "After the shit that was in those cards, I'm surprised you think I'd want anything to do with you." And he blocked me once and for all. I kept texting him, pleading with him to help me understand what I'd done to make him angry this time. I explained what my intentions had been, but he wasn't hearing anything I had to day.
Domestic Violence Protection Order
(December 2023 - January 2024)
I later learned that he filed a petition for a domestic violence protection order in District Court that very day, and that he'd had a hearing to grant him an emergency protection order against me the following day. But since I was in the dark about everything going on upstairs, and had been for so long, I kept texting him, begging for an explanation and an opportunity to make it right.
Silence was the only gift he gave me in exchange until the night of January 3, 2024, when he sent his ugly neighborhood friend downstairs to knock at my door and serve me the notice of the temporary restraining order.
I couldn't believe what I was reading. The shock of it paralyzed me. He had gathered up every little note, letter, card, and t-shirt I'd ever given him over the year we'd known one another and claimed they were evidence of me harassing him. He'd taken parts of messages out of context and retyped them as evidence of me making threats, when in their original context there was nothing at all menacing or threatening about them.
And worst of all, he'd included screenshots of my Plex Media Server showing thumbnails of our personal sex videos that were recorded by my home security cameras over the course of the whole year and claimed I had shared them publicly to humiliate him and that I didn't have permission to have them in the first place. It was complete bullshit!
I'd gathered all of those videos of us having sex with various guys and created a private library that only his account and mine could access. I'd done this in early September when he had blocked me as a gesture of goodwill. I wanted him to have them, to be able to download them if he wanted them. Since he'd blocked all means of communication with me, I had no way of informing him I'd created the library, and later, when we resumed communication, it slipped my mind.
But my server logs showed he had been watching those videos on his TV and his phone since September 27, 2023, a full two months before he filed his petition with the court. He'd had plenty of time to ask me about the videos, to confirm their security and his privacy, or even to ask me to remove them. Yet he kept silent about them for over two months. Something was fishy.
I've never had any kind of dealings with courts before. I'd had no experience putting together a defense or answering a complaint. I took to YouTube to find out what to do. I searched for an attorney to help counsel me through my defense, but none would take the case pro bono, and as an unemployed person with no income, my options were basically nonexistent.
When the hearing date came, I asked for a continuance to continue seeking counsel, and it was granted. The hearing was reset for January 25, 2024, and I continued calling around for a lawyer and even tried to get advice from the King County Bar Association and the Northwest Justice Project. No help to be found from anywhere.
So, I put together every scrap of evidence I had. Transcripts of our text messages where he had asked to borrow money and of our conversations regarding the sale of the car, the down payment, the estimate, and the termination of the agreement where he said he'd return my money. I took screenshots of the Cash App transactions that indicated "Loan" or "Down Payment" in the memos and showing the money going from my account to his.
I captured screenshots of my Plex Media Server settings and logs to show I'd put strong protections in place to protect those files and had shared them specifically and solely with one account, his. I included screenshots of the security settings on his account, on the library, and for comparison, of several of the people with whom I did actually share some of my libraries in exchange for access to theirs. All of my evidence clearly showed that no such sharing of his intimate images or videos had ever taken place.
The day of our rescheduled hearing, my Uber driver was late to arrive to pick me up and kept getting further and further away as the clock ticked down to our hearing time. I had already been very anxious about leaving my apartment (I'm agoraphobic), and the fear of arriving late for my hearing caused me to have a full blown panic attack.
When I realized there was no way I could make it to the courthouse in time for our 8:45 hearing start time, I ran inside and hurried to install Zoom on my PC, create an account to log in with, and found the meeting link to join the court remotely. I managed to log in just in time, but I was in such a foggy state of mind that everything was blurring together.
The judge called our case. My heart raced as she read the bogus complaint. Then the judge asked if I objected. I said "No, your honor," intending "I don’t want contact with him anymore," not "I consent to an order." But the order was issued without my giving testimony or presenting my evidence anyway. It later expired on Jan 25, 2025.
One year of silence that he would use as a sword rather than the shield it was intended to be.
The Aftermath
(February 2024 - Present Day)
What I can't figure out is why, after learning he'd been fed a load of crap about all that terrorist business, he would continue his campaign of hatred against me with such malice and rage. I get it. I embarrassed him. That was wrong of me. But surely he must be able to take into account that the version of me that did that was the product of months of his deceit, lies, and emotional abuse. The friend version of me that existed before he fell for the investigation bullshit would never have done that.
It's like he expects that I should have continued treating him like my friend, extending all the benefits and favors and loyalty that comes with that title, even when he had long since stopped behaving like one to me. That's just unreasonable.
One way or another, I plan to get the rest of the details about what was really happening behind my back, who was responsible, and why he chose to abandon me and abuse me like that. I've prepared a lengthy complaint that's ready for filing in Superior Court, but I'm considering (against my better judgement) offering him an opportunity through mediation to come clean and reveal to me all that he withheld while he was lying to my face and pretending we were still friends.
Finding out how long he lied to me and kept such impactful secrets from me was humiliating and hurtful beyond belief. Knowing how hard he tried to see me arrested as punishment for an action I took when he left me no means or recourse for resolving our outstanding financial dispute makes me angry. The unfairness of the entire situation is absolutely maddening, and I want answers.
The people who "investigated" me these last two years are still making their presence known, even in my new home. They must be trying to save themselves by doubling down on the bullshit they fed to Friend and using whatever stale warrant they might have had as a fishing net to try and dig up other things to pin on me.
The fact that I can and always have been able to hear them discussing me, my actions in the privacy of my home, and their opinions of all the above is a testament to how poorly these individuals conduct "covert" surveillance on a suspect. They are either completely inept at their chosen profession, or they are so far beyond done caring that I know to bother even trying to hide their chatter.
Either way, I'm still keeping my log, documenting each time I hear them, who it was, where, when, and what they talked about, so I can show in court how consistently they have harassed me and invaded my privacy since June 2023. I'd say that's cruel and unusual, as would any reasonable person out there.
So, Friend, if you happen to be reading this account of things from my perspective, you are now up-to-speed on what 2023 looked like from my side of the war, just 40 feet away and one floor down. I'd like to offer you a chance to tell me what it looked like from yours, now that you know I'm not a killer.
You owe me answers for what you did to me, Friend. I'm not after the money you were unjustly enriched by after negotiating a car sale in bad faith. I forgave that debt a long time ago. All I want from you is the truth, which is something you've kept from me for two and a half long, lonely years.
I’m open to mediation to clarify the timeline and decisions you made. If that’s declined, I’ll pursue the legal route. My ask is simple: truth and closure. You have a chance now to do the right thing and put this mess behind us both.
As always, it's all up to you.
