Poison Pen Letters...

One of my talents and hobbies is writing Poison Pen Letters- so that shall be the name of this here story, I've decided. I don't often give these letters to their intended recipients, choosing instead to keep them for myself to peruse at my leisure- when I have the time- or even to extend and embellish them further as I find more and more grievances to air. Unfortunately, this can have unpleasant consequences, as you shall soon see.

For the record; I Don't Feel This Way Anymore, but there was a time, for many months, that I was writing a PPL to a friend who had dumped me from her wedding party because I was going to eight and a half months pregnant by the time of the wedding. It angered me; but it wasn't even that She gave a stuff about me being pregnant- or so she said- apparently it was her mother who didn't think a pregnant bridesmaid was appropriate for her only daughter's special day. But as I got to thinking more and more about it I decided that maybe it was my friend who chose to axe me, and not her mother as she'd claimed.

It makes more sense- when from the moment I told her I was pregnant on the phone her whole attitude towards me changed, and she hadn't even told her mother that I was going to be eight months pregnant at this stage of the game. But then, maybe she just knew her mother wouldn't approve? I don't know. Never mind; I didn't really want to dress up in one of those dresses anyway; but the point was that as her supposed best friend, it should have been Me standing next to her on her big day, and I wrote all of this in a letter, plus a whole lot more...

Like how her mother was an interfering old bitch who would never be satisfied with her daughter, and who would always put her down, and that she was choosing her mother over me, when I was the supportive one and how it should have been us who got up and sang "Perfect" together and not that other chick she replaced me with. I told her I hated her gutlessness about the whole thing; how she didn't even tell me for four months that I'd been replaced as bridesmaid, even though I had already guessed when she didn't ask me to go shopping for shoes. And I hated that she avoided me at the wedding because it was easier and so she wouldn't have to hear that I only went at all because my Hubby had talked me into going or else I'd regret it, because otherwise I wouldn't have gone at all. I wonder if she realised that I never once said congratulations all day?

And I kept adding more venom to this letter, every week, never intending for it to be sent, just venting my unspoken emotions- until my eldest Son proudly tells me one morning that he's posted all of the letters in the kitchen- and I say, even the one without a stamp, and he says yep, I got a spare one out of your purse. For fucks' sake. Why the fuck did I put it in an envelope and address it at all?

I waited for a wek without hearing anything and then risked putting the phone back on the hook. Still nothing. She knew me better than to bother trying. Then, one day, there's a letter in the post for me, from her. Her own grievances about me, in reply, aren't flattering, to say the least. She wonders why I am not understanding of the whole bridesmaid thing, but I am; really. I understand that she had to please her mother- but it felt like she took me for granted for years then dumped me like a sack of hot shit when someone told her too. I get it; really, I do.

I get it that she let her mother come between us finally, like she had always wanted. I was just a 'lamb-roasting lesbian who camped at a nudist colony' to her- which is fairly ironic given that her daughter's had way more girl on girl action than I ever had- and untrue, as well, for I roasted pork more often than I did lamb, and still do. But what I don't understand is how four years have passed and how she keeps saying that she wants to make things up and then doesn't really bother trying. What's the go with that? I know she has a career and a husband now, and lives in another town, but that shouldn't matter with mates, and yet it does- for some unknown reason.

If the truth is going to be told she knows me very well, or at least she once did. She knows about my depression because she recognises it in herself. She understands, or at least she said she did, what it feels like to be alone and hopeless and lonely. And she said she knew the Voice and what that was like too. I guess I could have been one of those experimental friends people make at certain stages of their life- you know- to see what life's like from another perspective sometimes we slum it for a while- and I think that's what she must have been doing when she chose to be friends with me- slumming it.

I know that she looks down at me on some level and that's okay with me. It's because of how she grew up. It was blatantly obvious to me, from the start, that she wasn't capable of becoming a real Loser, that she was never really capable of it, and even loitering with me for six years as she did was not enough time to change that one simple fact.

Mate. If you want- I release you.