The Breaking of “The Wives”

[imood mood at time of entry: cranky]

The alternate name that I was considering for this entry was: Because Two-Faced Bitches in Size 6 Were Always My Style. It fits, but I thought I’d go with something else.

I originally wrote the bulk of this entry this morning and wanted to save it here sooner, but circumstances did not allow for this to happen. I hadn’t expected to get up and write this entry out in one go after holding it in for months either.

I actually woke up this morning, because I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So, I thought I’d take some time to write on the new fic that I am beginning. This entry came out instead. But hey, at least I’ve finally got it out now.

It’s a funny thing when you lose a friend or are on the verge of doing so. You tend to find out then whether they were ever truly your friend our not. In the case of Lucy and Trisha (and Tara, but it’s no surprise there), they weren’t.

Several months back, Trisha would constantly instant message, email, and call me to complain about Lucy never speaking to her anymore. She whined on about how Lucy only had time for Leila. I listened to her thoughts on the matter and made the effort to speak to Lucy, since she was supposed to be my wife.

Well, that endeavor turned out less than satisfactory, because both Lucy and Trisha went back on the things they said to me. Trisha pretended that she did not come bitching to me about never getting any attention from Lucy anymore. She acted as though she hadn’t said an ill word against Leila or how she didn’t really like Leila at all. She went back on her admission of how she was jealous that Lucy made it so that only Leila could see her online (It’s a newer Yahoo! Messenger feature.). She even went so far as to say that she was mediating between me and Leila, like I had some huge, well-known issue with her. You know, that Trisha secretly knew about, which she didn’t.

But, I listened to Trisha’s griping anyway and I tried to help that ungrateful, two-faced wench. I knew that Lucy and I didn’t have the best relationship in the entire world, but I felt then that I could talk to her honestly about all things. I seemed to have been mistaken, even though she once confessed her heartache at being raped at boarding school (if it ever truly occurred), bitched about her family (who doesn’t do that?!), volunteered to send her money when her college funding fell through, and stood by her as yet another one of her relationships went down in flames.

I am not one to wholly buy into stereotypes of people and relationships, but Lucy sort of lived as one. She would meet all sorts of new men and women every week/month, and would instantly jump into the sack with them. Then, she would be utterly surprised and heartbroken when they dumped her, cheated on her, and lied to her face. As a mother of two young children, I would have expected her to behave a bit more responsibly, despite her only being 23 at the time. But I said nothing to her, it was her life, and I wanted to be a friend and listen when she needed me to.

But I guess that one person listening to her whinging was never enough for her tastes. I suppose that should have been evident from her LiveJournal, because she’s always made quite a spectacle of herself there. I mean really made a spectacle of herself. Again, I just sort of played along and embraced the silliness that is fandom. It was fun, so what did I care?

But I should have cared. I should have cared enough to stop speaking to Lucy all together when she created a wank between me and Trisha the first time that I de-friended Trisha. I didn’t make a public announcement or rant in my journals about it. I quietly de-friended her and left it at that. Well, I spoke to Lucy not too long after, and I confessed my reasoning for doing so.

Trisha had a huge Confederate flag on her user info, and it didn’t sit well with me. Being the person that I am, I had absolutely no intention of demanding that Trisha remove the flag. If she wanted to be a racist, then so be it. There certainly wasn’t anything I could do to change her mind. But as a Black woman, I didn’t feel obligated to be friends with a Lucy-groupie who waved that flag around.

I thought that my confession was safe with Lucy. She was supposed to be my friend, so I had nothing to worry about, right? Wrong! Very wrong. No sooner had I told her the reason why, she ran straight back to Trisha and told her. She even went on to tell another friend of hers named Tara. Hell, for all that I know, she probably made a filtered entry to her friends list detailing every word that I’d told her. It certainly seems like the sort of thing that she would do.

I knew then, and from the telephone conversations that we’d had, that Lucy wasn’t the nice person she pretended to be. While she cooed to her friends in her journal, she would talk about them like crap behind their backs. This includes Tara and Elanor, a fellow wife at the time. Everytime we spoke, she would go on and on and on about how Tara was such a liar and how she would miraculously have real life circumstances that mimiced Lucy’s.

For instance, Lucy would constantly rant about how Tara had a made-up, blind boyfriend that can apparently fly up to her window several stories above the pavement. Lucy would laugh at Tara, stating that she, Lucy, asked her uncle about the injury Tara claimed to have cause her “boyfriend’s” blindness. At those times, I always wondered what she said about me.

Even though Lucy’s vicious side was clearly evident, I simply said nothing other than “Uhrmmm hrmmm. . .” What was I supposed to say? Gee, Lucy, that’s not very nice. Or: Gee, maybe she just wanted some attention from you. I don’t know.

And then there is the fact that she would repeatedly rant about how she didn’t like Elanor and didn’t have her on her Yahoo! Messenger friends list because she was “too British” and thought that she was better than everyone else. I tried to figure out a way to get my wives to sort of settle things, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to approach the situation. I did tell Lucy that Elanor was simply Elanor, and that I liked her regardless.

Truthfully, I did find Elanor to be a bit much for me on several occasions when our friendship was still new, but I learned to see that she was simply a person with a strong personality. Because of her, I learned to laugh at myself a bit more while in fandom. I have to say that I have always been, and always will be, grateful to her for that. It just made fandom seem much more enjoyable when we were teasing each other or poking fun at one another’s pairings or Houses. In fact, I still miss those talks, but she’s all kinds of busy these days, so that’s that. Not to mention that fact that Leila’s probably told her all sorts of ugly things about me.

The only former wife that I still talk to without any weirdness between us, that I know about, is Katherine. She’s always been a sweetheart from the very beginning. I didn’t know her at all when Lucy introduced us, but out of all of the hangers-on (not that Katherine is a hanger-on in the way that Trisha and Tara are) that Lucy sent in my direction, I have always liked Katherine best. She was just so easy-going and a peach to get along with. She didn’t cause drama or rant about how much she hated so-and-so, even though she was supposed to be their friend. I still admire this about her.

So, yes, it did hurt when Lucy and I stopped talking. Here I was, taking time out of my schedule to help mend fences between her and Trisha. I spoke to Lucy truthfully. Admittedly, I did tell Lucy that I never liked Leila myself, but not because I was jealous of her relationship with Lucy. What did I care? I had other friends, so why shouldn’t Lucy?

Naturally, Lucy ran straight back to Leila the very next day and made out like I was intensely jealous of their relationship. I tried contacting Leila when I found out about the event several days later, but that had mixed results. I tried sending her the chat transcript of exactly what I said to Lucy about her, and she made out like I committed a crime. I just wanted her to see for herself what was said, because in the end, Lucy’s duplicitous nature would come back to bite her, like it did everyone else Lucy knew. Heck, even Trisha admitted that she was jealous when Lucy turned around and married me and the girls instead of her, after they’d ‘known’ one another for several years at that point.

My actual dislike of Leila sprung from the way in which she had always rubbed me the wrong way. I had seen her around the fandom on LiveJournal before, but the despicable comments she left on Trisha’s entry concerning Terri Schiavo did it for me. I was surprised to see that Leila friended me not long after I read her comments. I simply loathed her, because she didn’t care that someone’s husband had willingly starved his wife to death. Since I maintain an open-friending policy on my LiveJournal, I did what any person would do if they didn’t want to be wanky, I friended her back. I tried to leave comments on her entries in hopes that she would grow on me and that my first impression of her would be proven wrong. It wasn’t.

In the time that my relationship between Lucy and myself dissolved, she and her “friends” (I don’t truly believe that she has any real friends, just fangirls that stroke her ego.) would all post in their journals about how I was being immature and wanky. What I would like to know is how exactly I was doing all of this while I was off working trying to earn a paycheck, so that I could pay bills? I would sleep and run errands doing the daytime, and then I would work at night. After I came home from work, I would attempt to answer email and the like. I was too exhausted to feud with anyone, so I’d love to know how I managed it all. Perhaps I am Super Secret Wanker Woman, and I never knew it until now. Hrmm. . . Not likely.

Following all of this drama, I had several people IMing me non-stop. One in particular was Tara. She would passive-agressively attack me and make out like she was the victim of the entire situation. Which, in a way, she was. She didn’t know the way Lucy truly felt about her or the fact that Lucy was clearly using her as a pawn.

Tara made it known to me that Lucy and Leila had been feeding her all types of garbage about me, and went on to ask me why wasn’t I slinging mud back. I told her that I didn’t care to, because it was wanky and not worth my time to do so. Eventually, I had to block Tara, because she would leave me numerous messages about Lucy’s wank “war.” I couldn’t have been bothered to fight dirty and slander Lucy and Leila’s names. Maybe I should have, I don’t know. I do know that that just wasn’t me.

Fandom is a large place, and I thought that perhaps we could all exist in the same place without any drama or name-calling or ridiculous “wars.” I was wrong, because those are exactly the types of things that Lucy feeds off of. True, I should have known, because the signs were all there, but I sincerely wanted to hope for the best. In fact, I was willing to send Lucy a little something on her birthday (Probably more Paid time on LiveJournal, because I am the one who originally gave her a Paid Account with Extra Icons. Biggest waste of money yet, if you ask me.), because I didn’t really harbor any ill will for her, at first. That was until I found out how much crap she had been talking about me behind my back. After that, I didn’t feel quite so nice towards her any longer.

Even though there was nothing I could do to stop Lucy, I kept repeating to myself that her karma would catch up with her – eventually. One day, she would know what it was like to be in my position. Or, at least she’d have a load of horrible things happen to her to balance out all of the horrible things that she’d done.

The last that I heard of her, she’d had all of her LiveJournal accounts stolen. I wanted to email her then to let her know that I might someone who’d be willing to help her out, but I thought, “Forget it! This bitch intentionally made me out to be an immature jerk, when I didn’t have a thing to do with her ‘war’.” Then, I thought, “Let her rot. She deserves it.”

I tried never to think, “Oh, I hope that she dies.” or some other hurtful nonsense, because she does have two children to look after. Technically, her children do have family members to look after them in her stead, but children need their biological parents. I also tried to refrain from thinking the same thoughts about Leila, because she also has a young child.

So that was that. That’s how The Wives went down in flames. There was the matter of an entry I posted in my LiveJournal that Lucy and her sidekick (Leila) got all upset about. And even that was only posted after I thought Elanor left the fandom for good, or so she thought at the time. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t let go of our friendship then, because “The Wives” dissolved the moment that Elanor deleted her entire LiveJournal.

The community we had together is still there. I briefly deleted it, but I brought it back out for sentimental reasons. There were entries posted there that I didn’t want to lose. It was also a testament to the fact that at one time, I had believed that I had three wonderful, loving Wives who I could tell anything to. Three Wives that I could trust with any secret and not have it betrayed. You know what I have to say to that now, silly, silly me.

Daniele