The letter not worth sending.

For 3 years now a friend of mine has been involved with a married man. As we head to the close of year 3, I find myself utterly exhausted from it whereas she is still as passionate, emotional, melodramatic and stupid as she was day 1. Here's what I want to say but won't.

Dear Manic-depressive, unstable mess:

Last night while you wept to me on the phone, I sat and ate tuna casserole and giggled and smiled at my 9-month old also eating tuna casserole and evidently loving it. I held the phone receiver away so (heaven forbid) you could not hear signs of my life in the background. (Yeah, I noted your comment about how when people sound joyful you want to vomit.) I used to give you my full attention, but come on! The presses don't stop for me when this shit happens anymore. Here's why: It always happens. I can't count the number of occasions you have interrupted with your self-absorbed and reckless whining. And if something's not happening, it just happened, is going to happen, might happen, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam (with emphasis on the nauseam). It's as plain as the nose on your face: you're addicted to drama; you like being distraught; someone has misinformed you that "other woman" is synonymous with martyr; and - oh yeah - you're wasting your life and mine... so from now on I'm just going to sit and eat my casserole.

Why are you so lonely? Why is every conversation littered with Oh, I'm so lonely? If you haven't figured it out - giving up a man who might not have been "him" but who loved you, created children with you, and best of all didn't demean and debase you, splitting up week-to-week custody of your children (and constantly proclaiming you have nothing to live for despite said children), taking a low-pay-no-reward job so you could be in closer proximity to "him", alienating family and friends, hooking up with others on the side because of your loneliness but allowing them to humiliate you, too... these could all be factors in your loneliness. But also think about this: Grown ups do get lonely. Conversely, some adults long for loneliness (just one Sunday morning of loneliness, please!). The difference is we don't have the luxury of whining. Guess it's true what they say - adulthood ain't for sissies.

I can't make you love yourself. And God knows I'm done trying. So how about this? Can we agree you'll stop sending me links to You Tube videos of some overwrought country singer glorifying being the other woman *(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIyxkZod2cM) and writing in the subject line, "This is me in a nutshell." Can you stop asking me every time I answer the phone (1,2, 3 times a day), "Have you got a second?" (Because YOU DO NOT CARE IF I DON'T!) Can you stop injecting my life in the last 20 seconds of our conversations because I'm not stupid? (By the way, can we agree I'm not stupid? I may have one particularly stupid friend but that doesn't - in fact - make me stupid?) Can we stop philosophizing on how "his" wife could be so stupid to take him back? (<- Honestly it makes me feel more sorry for you than anything else does to hear you describing yourself in her without even realizing it! When is THAT light bulb going to go off?) Can you please quit pretending anything that happens is surprising? Why does it throw you so off guard to repeat the same cycle again and again? For Christ's sake - even cockroaches get when the lights go on they need to scurry!

And finally - when you choose to be with someone who abandoned you a decade earlier at your life's most vulnerable moment and he has a pregnant wife and two children, is an alcoholic, doesn't have a steady job, lives in a trailer, has Hepatitis, is in to you for 20k, and he seems hellbent on outdoing himself in that inhumane category, just admit you're going to take whatever he plans on handing you and spare the rest of us any hope you'll wake the hell up.

I could write this for the rest of the day and still not have scratched the surface. The problem is the meter for this is (well and definitely) up. I suppose it's of no real concern to you that our friendship is, too...

Ahhhh...

Okay, so... all that purging has left me little energy for more. I know I owe Blu & M an 8-fact blog cause I got tagged. I'll get to it! I'll get to it! It's just that right now I've had my fill of introspection.