#fbtm redux

[millerflintstone]

So one of the things I was dealing with in October but didn't really write or talk about was memories of my ex best friend and her husband. This week, I saw her Instagram account was suggested to me on my hooping IG, so she's on my brain again. She and I were roommates at UNC during my junior year, which was my first year there. She was a senior in the nursing school program.

At the time, she was a bottle blonde from a small town in NC and was not thrilled to see my name as her roommate. I have a very Hispanic last name, which was off-putting to her (she admitted after the fact). You were automatically assigned a roommate if you didn't make housing arrangements the prior year and her ex roommate had graduated.

She liked that I loved art and classical music. I recognized the Monets she chose for her side of the room which none of her local friends appreciated. We did enjoy being roommates to the point where I ended up going home with her some weekends and met her family. We both learned that Southern culture and Hispanic culture had similarities with both of them being very patriarchal.

Our friendship was really forged by stress though. She was in an emotionally abusive (and possibly physically abusive) relationship that ended over Christmas of our first year as roommates (1996). Around the same time, my sister tried to kill herself. Nothing like the intimacy of living with someone who was basically a stranger and then really bonding due to trauma.

Between February and May of 1997, some suite-mates and I got to witness her using chat rooms as a bar. She threw caution to the wind and started meeting strange men off of coolchat.com chatrooms as part of her rebound. It was MESSY.

The first dude was single. He was an accountant in his 40s who flew from MI to NC for a weekend. The next guy was from NC but was still married. Nothing like angry calls from his wife to our dorm room.

The final guy was from SC and 52 (she was 22). Unfriendly and I even met this dude. I've forgotten the details on how that went down, but I remember thinking that she would see the dude who was very noticeably 52 with white hair and a pot belly compared to 29 year old Unfriendly and snap out of it. She didn't.

He groomed her. After she graduated UNC she was living with her folks. Her parents did not approve of this relationship and took her computer away. He bought her a whole new system. He convinced her to move to SC with him, after she got her first nursing job he controlled where her money was spent, and he threatened to kill her repeatedly. Oh, and this dude was also married. I didn't learn about that and the abuse until much later. She was living in some apartment, I think, since the guy was still living at home with his wife.

This last bit occurred over a year and a half. I was finishing my last year of college while she was living in SC. And she eventually stopped emailing or chatting with me via ICQ until about mid 1998 when I got updates from her finally. Seemed she was happy.

She had been able to break away briefly to talk to me on the phone in November of 1998. She had emailed me again earlier that month and it was not good. We had to time when she could call me as this was before texting/ wide spread cell phones.

When we talked on the phone she told me about some of the abuse and that he had threatened to kill her with a loaded gun. I told her to just pack up and leave when he was at work because I was sure that dude would kill her eventually.

She did. She quit her job and moved back to her parents' home in their small city in NC. Her parents "rewarded" her with a brand new black Mustang.

The guy still had his hooks in her, though. At the time, I had a single room at UNC with two beds, so I told her to come early the week of my graduation (Dec 1998) before Unfriendly arrived so we could have girl time. She'd be able to sleep in the extra bed.

Then she made an excuse that she could not come as early as we had originally planned because of her grandma needing her help, but she'd be there for my graduation. I figured the guy had convinced her to go back to SC.

I called her mom while she was allegedly at her grandma's to give her some kind of made up information since I didn't know her grandma's phone number. I can't even remember what my excuse was. Her mom told me that she thought her daughter was with me. I told her mom that I figured something was up because she told me that she was spending some time with her grandma. Her mom said we both knew where she was.

I asked her mom for her husband and her to show up at UNC to make sure she got home safe and they refused. They felt she was an adult and if she was going to throw her life away so be it. I was aghast, but maybe that was for the best now that I'm looking back and telling this story?

She was so fragile. I did not understand how her parents would not want to protect her. I know she put them through a lot when she moved out but it seemed very heartless. I was so pissed that I yelled at her mom over the phone.

I didn't want her returning to that creep and thought she would go back to him without her parents ushering her home. I remember sitting outside of my dorm room suite the night before graduation. I was looking out over the railing and was just so stressed out because I was so worried that she was going back to what eventually would be her end and her parents didn't see it that way. I felt helpless.

Wonderful way to spend a time I was supposed to be celebrating, right? I didn't feel that way then but I do feel that way now.

She did show up for my graduation to my relief. She was not a smoker. He was. She REEKED of cigarette smoke. I said nothing about that.

We hung out afterwards. She had dinner with me and Unfriendly and another friend. I did not let on that I was freaked out, knew she had lied and that her parents knew. I had no idea if she was returning home to her folks or to her abuser but did not want to drive her back to him. I figured if she knew her parents knew she lied to them, she'd just go back to that jerk.

After she left, I fully expected to never hear from her again. I figured if she went home, her parents would yell at her and basically tell her that my phone call gave her up and that she wouldn't forgive me. Or that she would return to SC and eventually get murdered by that creep and that I find out from her parents that she was killed.

When she got home to her parents', she was put on lockdown basically. She did get therapy and eventually thanked me. After some weird boyfriends, she did meet a guy that was good to her but kind of a jerk anyway. They got married in the early 2000s and I was her maid of honor.

That's the backstory and it's greatly condensed. More on what's been bothering me later.