Ayase Leilani's Blog

It’s funny how things work out
Such a bitter irony
Like a kick right to the teeth
It fell apart right from the start
But I couldn’t even see the forest for the trees
(I’m afraid you asked for this)

~Bring Me the Horizon - True Friends

This one’s long.  Buckle up and get ready.

It began when I reached out to her in the dead of the Winter of 2015.  She lived far away from me, but I never shunned long-distance friendships or relationships.  She had just revealed her gender identity and desire to transition from male to female.  I had spent a great deal of time with people over the years, helping and supporting them through these life journeys and thus, I had decided to do the same for my ex.  From what I had seen of her, I got the impression that she was a very kind and loving person with a great deal of passion.

Things got off to a very solid start with our friendship; she was shy and reserved before she came out of the closet, but after that she talked almost non-stop.  She seemed desperate for someone to let her out of herself and to encourage her down the paths in life she so desperately wanted to take.  Thus, I felt as if the friendship was rooted in a very solid foundation and that the two of us would be happy together for a long time to come.  We began to chat with each other every single night over messenger apps, deeply interested in our time spent with each other.

I admit I fell for her very quickly; it probably was a month or so after we became friends.  She had told me very early on that she had no real interest in long-distance relationships and that she wasn’t even interested in getting together with someone else at the time, which I took very seriously.  I was worried about my own feelings, so in the interest of full disclosure, I confessed almost right after I began feeling the way I did, telling her straight away that I was expecting total rejection and would be very happy if we could remain the best of friends.

This made her nervous, but at the same time, she also made it very clear to me that she did trust my intentions.  I told her that if she ever had a change of heart about me, she could be the one to let me know and we could make any decisions from there; I made it clear that I never wanted to be any less than her best friend, but that I was always open to be more than that.  This conversation led to some stress, but it ebbed quickly and our friendship continued, becoming even stronger in the wake of this matter.

Things actually began to move really quickly from there.  True to my word, I let her advance everything, although I did attempt to encourage her about a great many things that were going on in her own heart a lot of the time.  She began to open up to me with stories about her own family history and her friends, both past and present.  This was where I first began to hear about all the abuse she had suffered over the years:  a neglectful father who never cared for a single thing she ever said or a single way she felt…and an overbearing mother who made it very clear to her that her brother was the favourite and that she was expected to do as she was told.  Friends she called “shallow;” people who were concerned more about social life and appearances than they were her or their own friendships.

I was fool enough to believe these stories, not even considering for one moment that any of them may be blatant lies designed to garner my sympathy.  I am an extremely empathetic person by nature and have a very easy time connecting to others emotionally, so I did what anyone who has a nature like that would do:  I listened constantly to every single thing she said, hanging off of every bit of her story.  In response, I offered heartfelt love, compassion and a desire to show her that I was no socialite; my interest in her, her feelings and her desires was very, very real.

And so it went, for months and months as Winter turned into Spring and then into Summer.

I should add some stuff about myself and how much of myself I let out to my ex for a good portion of our relationship, since it’s truly important to what comes next.  I struggle with a terrible guilt complex that I have tried desperately to overcome; this is in addition to chronic anxiety and depression, which lead me to internalise any hateful or abusive things others in my life say to me.  I am also anorexic and have related health concerns, including physical weakness and poor physical endurance even for the most mundane of tasks.  Due to my challenges, I have essentially been forced into the NEET lifestyle and am good for little else outside of being a housewife who can manage affairs at home (I make a very good manager, so there is that).  Thus, I need–and am grateful for–people in my life who care for me.

My ex did a great deal of the talking in our relationship and I ended up not letting out a lot of my own feelings to her early on, spending most of my time listening to her instead and letting her out of herself, which she so desperately needed (or rather, told me she needed).  This was basically for two reasons:  the first reason was that she had so much going on in her own life and I didn’t want to burden her with my challenges (my guilt complex always rears its ugly head in these cases), while the second reason had to do with us not being close enough yet for me to be sure I could trust her with my own situation.

My own feelings really began to blossom throughout all of this time and I began to notice that she also became more and more attached to me as time went on.  Eventually, she let it out of the bag that she had feelings for me, although she was nervous and unwilling to get involved with me, especially since she saw me as very unstable, emotionally.  When she said this, I took it to mean that she had noticed the girl behind my smile and generally cheerful demeanour, which actually made me really happy, as I was certain this meant she would be ready to hear some of my own concerns.

Less than a year later, I would learn how tragically wrong this interpretation of her feelings was.  However, at this time, I began to talk with my ex a great deal throughout each and every day instead of just seeing each other in the evening when we were both done with our daily lives.  It wasn’t very long before things really began to get very intimate, both emotionally and physically (even though we were limited by typed actions in messenger apps).  I eventually asked her one night, “we don’t really feel much like friends any more, do we?  Are we dating?”

She answered “yes, we are dating.”  And thus began some of the happiest times I’d had in years.

I began opening up to her slowly from that point forward, telling her bits and pieces about my own past, as well as my own struggles.  We began to call each other every single day, sometimes several times a day.  I began to help her with her schoolwork (she was going to grad school for a Ph.D in geochemistry at the time) and we got closer and closer.  As I revealed more and more to her, we began to have fights from time to time.  We called them “hurdles” and always spent a great deal of time talking them over.  Many of them would happen whenever I would come to her with my concerns and feelings of despondency, but I never put two and two together; while I left each struggle feeling as if we’d become closer, she left each and every struggle with more ammunition for “sob stories” she’d tell her echo chamber after dumping me.

Not even beginning to think that she was extremely selfish and fighting with me over my challenges because she wanted to be the one being paid sole attention to, I kept on carrying on.  She continued to draw me in by responding to me with her own desires to take care of me both financially and emotionally.  I was so scared to ask for any of this and I didn’t even ask, since she openly offered (to the point of pushing) financial and emotional support.  She would say things like, “you need to tell me your feelings!” and “you need to let me give you money when you need it!”

When you’re so emotionally fragile and accustomed to people abusing and taking advantage of you, it’s not even possible to notice when someone is using reverse-psychology like this to control and use you emotionally.  I accepted her offer…and then she proposed to me.

Things became a whirlwind from here.  She had decided (with my encouragement) to change from a doctoral track to a masters track and was set to pick a place she wanted to live and begin her life in half a year.  To say that things were moving quickly is an understatement, but I had begun to trust her so deeply due to her expressing interest in my desires and wishes for our future that I went along with everything, doing all I could to accomodate her.  She decided she wanted to move out and live where I was at, getting a teaching job instead of further pursuing a doctorate later on.

In all of this time, she gave me money, offered me a great deal of her own time and openly begged me to let my feelings out to her.  She came out to visit me where I lived, we made love for the first time in person (anything before had been cybersex or phone sex) and I felt as if nothing could go wrong.

It wasn’t until I went to visit her for the first time where she lived that I learned that I was so very wrong.

Things went south rapidly.  The fights we had began to increase in intensity and she began to seem very uncomfortable about the idea of leaving abusive people in her past, where they belonged.  I encouraged her daily–sometimes several times a day–to put her mind on beginning the new life she so desperately wanted.

The fights got really bad and at one point, even involved her roommate, who had done some terrible and illegal things to my ex over the time they’d lived together (I won’t say more than this because even after all my ex has done to me, I’m not interested in ruining her life).  At one point, I screamed at her roommate, telling her that what she was doing was putting my ex’s future in jeopardy and that she only cared about herself.  I also confronted some of her colleagues at grad school who spent a lot of time ignoring her and treating her like crap.

I was the only one standing up for anybody at that point, as she would side with her friends behind my back on every single issue.  I didn’t realise it at the time, but she began drawing a narrative in her head about how me encouraging her to begin her new life (that she had requested, proposed to me for and began arranging without me putting any pressure on her) was me not caring about what she truly wanted:  to be with her abusive, unempathetic friends, neglectful father and overbearing mother.  The fights kept on increasing in intensity and began to reflect what I had begun to notice:  she wasn’t interested in anything but her own feelings and her own fears.  She projected all of these things onto me all the while.

I began to want to leave.  On several occasions I said this to her.  However, I always stayed, wanting to believe that she wasn’t doing anything behind my back and that I needed to trust what I thought her and I were building together.

It was the most foolish decision of my life.

It all came to a head one day.  I had asked her to take out the trash before going to grad school the next day, because it was full.  When I woke up, the trash was buzzing with flies and generally looking and smelling gross.  I took it out, furious that she didn’t seem to care about even the simplest requests I made of her.  I confronted her when she got home about this and she used it as a reason to begin talking to me about separating.  She painted it as ironic; that it was strange that she suddenly had begun to worry about this.  It wasn’t until months later that I would learn that she was wanting to do this to me all along.

Two and a half hours later, I was at the airport, ready to fly home on her dime.  She had dumped me, told me she never wanted to see me again and that it was all because she didn’t want any of this after all.  I felt used, abused, neglected and completely thrown away.  And due to my guilt complex, I thought it was all my fault.  Maybe I should have never opened up to her.  Maybe I never did enough for her.  Maybe I should have just been quiet and let her let out to me forever and ever without ever opening up to her.

Maybe I was the jerk she told me she thought I was during our final fight.

It wouldn’t be until months later that I finally processed all this and realised she was a sadistic sociopath who wanted nothing more than to take me for a ride, just like so many others.

As I boarded the plane and we taxied down the runway, I broke out into deep, lonely, painful and unbearable sobs, earning the sympathetic glance of the man sitting across the aisle from me as we flew into the sky.

And thus, the aftermath of the whole messy ordeal began.