Where on Earth did you go?
My closest friend from high school vanished from Facebook a couple of days ago. This is profoundly disappointing because her facebook page was her only sign of life. She could ignore my e-mails pretty easily but I could always look on her page and see she was very active in farmville. This would show me that she was in fact somewhere up to something. With the deactivation of her account, I am left to wonder about her and cast e-mails into the void of cyberspace only to go unanswered.
How did this all come about? I can't really give a definitive answer. I can only theorize.
CT is her name. When I met her in 8th grade, she had an it girl status at school. Guys wanted her and girls wanted to be friends with her because any association would up one's status to cool. Being cool had ceased mattering to me by then so I had a casual kind of relationship with her, eating lunch together occasionally. The boys in my class following lunch would grill me on what she was like. If they were lucky, they would be accepted by her to carry her books or give her a ride somewhere. She juggled these drones in such a way as to dismiss them entirely while still giving them hope.
It wasn't until a slumber party when we were fifteen that I realized there was more to her than good looks. The girls at the party were divided into two rooms and she and I ended up being the only two people in the second room. We talked most of the night about everything from musical taste, philosophies on life to our current boyfriends. I found her to be funny, intelligent, irreverent and quick. We became extremely close.
Our friendship had its ups and downs with us not talking for some periods. We traveled in different circles. I was a nerd and socialized mostly with the other nerds in my classes. Although she was definitely smart enough to be in the advanced classes, it was not at all something important to her. She hung out with the stoner loser crowd composed mostly of people old enough to buy booze and cigarettes who had flunked out of high school. The greatest tension between us came from the boy she was dating. I will call him Hernia. Hernia got her into all kinds of drugs, cheated on her incessantly and got her pregnant several times. I watched her waste away under the control of him and gave her an ultimatum, either ditch him and stop the drugs or not have me in her life. She was never too fond of ultimatums and we did not speak for nearly a year.
She eventually did get her life together. She stopped the drugs and started hanging out with a better crowd. Her terrible taste in men still remained. Like many women I know, she had the two archetypes: the bad boy and the nurturing provider. This stemmed from all her female role models attaching themselves to men that treated them like garbage. I also believe her choice in men had something to do with her convoluted feelings about children.
If asked, she would go on a tirade about not wanting children. Consciously, she knew she not only didn't have the stuff to raise a child but that she was too selfish. She was too "fly by the seat of her pants." She liked to change things just when they were becoming predictable and she knew she could not do that with a child to raise. By the same token, it was commonly accepted in her family to have children in the teens. She was surrounded by friends and relatives all with children. I would catch her from time to time smiling at babies. She wanted the bad boy to knock her up and the provider to help her raise the child. This was all subconscious, though.
This bad judgement regarding men led to a lot of bad situations. She would get with the provider and things would seem all well and good. She is a feral creature, though. Her providers were also control freaks who wished to possess her. Some tried by keeping constant tabs on her. Some removed her from social situations all together, leaving her in a deserted house with no means of transportation. She still managed to get into trouble via the internet.
I encouraged her to live with me in California and she did for a few stints. We're terrible influences on each other. We'd blow our money on cigarettes, stay up all night and hang around men. When I got a steady boyfriend, that changed. I wasn't around all that much. Perturbed by this, she moved back down South where we are from. This did not stop us from talking. We would talk weekly.
Soon she met a guy. He appeared to be a sweet guy with a good job. She fell for his line immediately. It wasn't until they moved to Miami that she realized what he was. He wasn't sweet. He was just another control freak. He left her everyday in a hotel where they were living knowing darn well that she was too frightened to explore outside. After many complaints from her, I said that I did not like this guy one bit. She, of course, told him and he broke her cell phone deliberately leaving her dependent on his kindness to let her use his phone.
The calls became less and less frequent and her attitude was slowly shifting to that of an abused woman. She would defend him even after she told me that he threw her on the ground and spat on her. It was like Stockholm Syndrome. She was beginning to be subservient to her captor. I would suggest my coming down to help her move away but it was too late.
I don't know what is going on in her life. I try e-mailing and on the rare occasion that she does reply her letters are scattered and make little sense. They could be married and have a child. I don't know. She would never tell me.
It is always a sad thing to lose a friend, especially a close one. While she was on Facebook, I could peruse her profile and know that she was somewhere. Now that her profile has been deactivated, she appears to have vanished into thin air with all living traces vanished.
So if you are reading this CT, I miss you. Please write me if you ever need me. Don't give up on your life. You are too smart and worthwhile to be some bully's complacent little wife. I know you just turned thirty and you probably think this means that good times are over but that is far from true. There are so many more adventures to be had and I hope that one day we will have them together.