My Best Friend Who I Trusted With All My Heart Tried To Destroy Me
The bitter end of a toxic relationship.
Brooke Cagle | Unsplash It was her birthday.
We made plans for her to come visit me at my house since my husband, Micah, was at work. She wanted to show me the movie “Control” about Ian Curtis, the frontman for Joy Division, who had sadly died young at 23. She was a huge fan.
When she arrived, she was holding a large bottle of wine even though it was 11:00 a.m. I grabbed a couple of cups, and we repeatedly toasted her birthday and attempted to watch the movie, both of us becoming too drunk to pay attention. The bottle was nearly empty before noon.
We chatted and laughed and gushed over each other, saying that we would always be best friends no matter what and that we loved each other.
When Micah got home at the end of the day, I was passed out in the bathroom after throwing up. She was passed out in her car. My husband shook me awake in disgust and shouted at me. I ignored him and went out to the car to see if my friend was okay.
Somehow, I had slept off my drunken stupor and was completely sober by the time I got to her car. She was slumped over onto the steering wheel. I petted her hair and tried to get her to wake up, but she pushed me away. Her husband arrived, woke her up, and tried to drive her home, but she wasn’t having it. She wanted me to take her home instead.
I was able to drive by then, so we moved her to my car, and the two of us headed to her house. She was awake but still intoxicated. I played some music I knew she would like, trying to make her feel better.
“You’re such a phony,” she suddenly announced, cutting through our silence. “You’re like a Stepford wife, so unbelievably fake. Everybody knows it.”
I was stunned by what she had said. She had never spoken to me this way before. We were supposed to be best friends. The next day, I chalked it up to her being drunk and decided to let it go. I shouldn’t have.
From the beginning, there was something strange about our friendship.
She was my husband’s ex-wife. When we first met, Micah had to drop something off to her. He took at least two hours in the bathroom to get ready, and then he insisted that I drive over there with him. When I teased him about all the primping, he turned to me with a serious face.
“You should always look your best when you see your ex. That way, they will know what they’re missing.”
It seemed bizarre to me. I didn’t put on a ton of makeup and obsess about my hair whenever I saw my ex-husband. I honestly didn’t care. Back then, I believed Micah loved me and would never hurt me. Still, the whole thing was concerning.
She met us at her front door. We were both extremely nice to each other despite the awkwardness of the situation Micah had forced us into. We chatted for a minute or two, but then I had to chase my husband who was already heading toward the car.
It occurred to me that Micah was using me to make her jealous. There was no other reason for me to be there. I realized I was merely a spotlight that he shined in her face, a reason for her to feel the regret he seemed to crave. We didn’t talk on the way home. As I sat in the passenger’s seat, I felt the full force of his love for her down to my bones.
I didn’t bring it up, though. I should have.
Photo: Liza Bakay/Pexels
I left Micah for the first time after our daughter was born.
He ignored our child's existence and didn’t help with her care at all. He was a new father, but his life didn’t seem to change in any way. Over time, he had also become abusive and screamed monstrous things at me regularly.
After I moved away from Micah and into an apartment, his ex-wife contacted me to offer her support. She told me about all the trouble she had getting Micah to divorce her. She eventually had him arrested for stalking, the same thing that I was dealing with.
I was grateful that somebody understood. Most of my friends dumped me after I married Micah because they couldn’t stand him, but there was somebody who knew exactly what I was going through. We chatted often online, telling each other about our histories with Micah and eventually discussing everything else under the sun. I was grateful to have made a good friend.
During one of our chats, I mentioned something catty about somebody. She wrote, “You would know.” When I asked her what she meant, she told me it was just the way she joked around and that I would get used to it. I believed her. I shouldn’t have.
Not too much time passed before we were doing everything together. We went out to breakfast and lunch and hunted through thrift stores. My other friends thought it was weird, that an ex-wife and current wife were best buddies. However, I defended the relationship and told them she was different.
Photo: EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA/Pexels
She started bringing me Percocet about three months into our friendship.
I never asked her to in the first place, but whenever we would meet, she would slip me a “happy pill" to brighten my mood. It seemed harmless at first, almost fun. The medication made me feel buzzingly happy for a few hours, and after a while, I looked forward to getting it when I would see her.
Once she shared almost half her bottle with me. She told me I’d be able to take a pill anytime I wanted. I thought I could control myself, but I was out of them within a week. It was obvious that I was already heavily addicted to the opiate. I only blamed myself for not being able to stop taking them.
I called her back and asked for a few more, promising to use them to wean off. Of course, I took them in short order and then went through a painful withdrawal. When I had such bad anxiety that I was shaking, she came over to comfort me.
In a weird coincidence, Micah injured his hip and was prescribed oxycodone, which was a hell of a lot stronger than her pills. Before long, I couldn’t get out of bed, work, or function without narcotics. Both of them would give them to me liberally and then yank them away, sending me into burning pain in my bones and severe depression like I’d never known.
Then there were the times when Micah would go over to her house when her husband wasn’t home. He’d tell me about it later, waving me away when I asked why he would do such a thing. It happened often enough that I started to get suspicious, but I still believed she hated him as much as I did.
I finally found the nerve to divorce Micah in 2012.
After I left, I checked myself into a women’s halfway house due to my drug addiction. She said she was happy for me and that I still had her support, but she grew to resent not having me around full-time.
Even though I couldn’t stand Micah anymore, the divorce was difficult for me. I blamed myself for all the things he did, for not leaving him, for not standing up for myself. One day, I went to her house, and she tried to hand me a box containing all the love letters Micah had written to her in the past. I told her I didn’t want to see them. She looked disappointed. I didn’t understand her motive for trying to make me read them.
I gave most of my attention to my recovery and the women who surrounded me with love and healing. I still considered her a close friend, but at the same time, I knew she would be my undoing as long as she was still willing to give me her pills. I was still fairly weak, and I wouldn’t have been able to say no.
I found out that she and Micah were secretly emailing each other when I guessed his password and looked at his messages. He was threatening me, and I wanted to get any kind of ammunition. In her messages, she told him everything I was saying about him, and they mocked me back and forth while writing “lol.”
It was such a severe betrayal that my traumatized brain couldn’t handle it. Instead, I pretended I didn’t see anything at all. I decided that I’d just be more careful about what I told her. The other alternative of confronting her seemed impossible in my newly sober and fragile state.
I called her when Micah died after either trying to jump on or in front of a moving train.
Since I knew it would be a shock to her, I tried to break the news gently. She dropped the phone and sounded like she was hyperventilating. Her husband picked up the phone, and I repeated the news to him. She was so upset that she couldn’t come back to the phone.
Later, she told me she and her husband drove over to the scene of the accident and looked around. It seemed almost silly to me that she was so upset. All we ever did was make fun of Micah and talk about how evil he was. Grieving over him was completely different.
She started to distance herself from me. We used to chat online every single morning, but she started sending me one-or-two-word sentences back. Either that, or she would say she had an appointment and had to go. Because we were so close, withdrawing from her was almost as hard as withdrawing from drugs.
Our relationship technically ended over Donald Trump. I didn’t realize what a big supporter she was, and she told me one day that she didn’t like me sharing negative posts about him. I didn’t understand why she was letting politics interfere with our friendship and told her that. She responded by telling me to leave her alone. I did.
At first, I was heartbroken over losing her as a friend. We had spent so many years being inseparable, and suddenly I didn’t have her around to talk about things like we used to do. Strangely, it was worse than my divorce from Micah. I no longer loved him when we broke up, but I still loved her up until the very end.
The anger came later. The more I thought about things she said or did, the stronger my feelings were that she and Micah had used me to their benefit. Maybe it was because I had money I was willing to share or that I was extra nice to them, but they took advantage of me at my weakest points.
I didn’t care about Micah. Honestly, I didn’t expect any better from him. He had flaws right from the beginning that I overlooked on purpose so I wouldn’t rock the boat in our relationship. I felt worthless and helpless and thought I needed his love to sustain me. He used the fact that I opened my heart to him as an opportunity to take everything I had.
She was different. I told her my deepest secrets and feelings. I trusted her with all my heart. She was the last person I thought would betray me, but I let her do it over and over again. I was mad at myself for ignoring all the red flags and continuing to be friends with her.
A long time passed, actually years, when I didn’t have friends in my life. I didn’t trust anybody after what happened, so anyone who offered their friendship to me was swiftly rebuked. Honestly, I didn’t trust myself to give my heart away again only to have it stomped on again. It had been hell, and I wasn’t willing to ever go through that again.
Photo: Ivan Samkov/Pexels
I can tell that I haven’t fully healed because sometimes I still hate her with the fury of a thousand suns.
Maybe there has been a little progress, but just hearing her name still makes me angry. I often think of what I’d say to her if she ever contacted me, which hasn’t happened in six years. Would I be able to control myself and not scream obscenities at her? As much as I’ve grown as a person, I don’t think I could stop myself.
To an extent, I still have trouble trusting people. My two best friends are women I have known since high school who came back to me after my divorce from Micah. They have loved me and looked out for me since I was fourteen, but I ignored them for years because they rightfully called me out for marrying Micah and putting up with his abuse. It was a huge mistake to turn away from them and towards him, and I understand that now better than ever.
This is the first time I have spoken or written about her. I’m doing it now to further heal from the pain. I realize I still have massive PTSD from those days, which my psychiatrist has confirmed. It’s still difficult to think about the things that happened and how I let myself be used and destroyed for so long. I know have to get past it, though.
When I think about Micah, I feel nothing. I’ve done a lot of work to get to that point. She is a different story. I’m not the same person I was when I met her. I’ve become jaded and often doubt others and myself. I don’t want to feel anything for her, good or bad. I want her to cease to exist in my head, but first I have to let her go.
I’m more than ready to try.
Glenna Gill is a writer and blogger from Charlotte, North Carolina. Her articles have been featured in Scary Mommy and P.S. I Love You. When I Was Lost is her first full-length book, a memoir of love, loss, and hope.