Dating : My Childhood Best Friend Wrote an Award-Winning Novel About Me

“I had no leftover concerns for her well-being after a short while. I started seeing more and more of the woman she’d become and suddenly my fear was confirmed: she never needed me. She was much better off without me. As in, she was really much better off without me. The sight of her happiness burns my eyes all the way to the optic nerve, straight to the brain.

“I never would have guessed that she was capable of being happy. Not without me. Not without the shallow distraction that I provided her from the crippling pain that she was in. God, was she in a lot of pain. Loads of it. But somehow I knew that even if I had to leave her (which I did, didn’t I?), she would be alright. Or, should I say, her pain wouldn’t get any worse. In her own words, she had already hit rock bottom. There was only so much damage that I could do. What I didn’t expect to see was any startling improvements after my departure. I left and never looked back.

“Felicia changes so many lives. She must be feeding off of them. Of her creations wandering the Earth, dazed by the loss of their master. In a way, that was me. The vertigo of cutting ties with my creator, my better half, the broken girl who was never as broken and mean as I was, the girl who taught me everything I used to prize about myself, just left me for the dead. Hopeless. Ready for a new beginning. A blank slate. A chapter without her, bearing none of her masterful design. What kind of monster does what I did?

“She gave me everything until there was nothing left to give. I don’t know. I couldn’t live in her shadow any longer. She was simple, in a way that overwhelms you. She appeared to be extremely complex and enigmatic but all she was…

“I don’t know what she was.

“I never think about her.

“I hate her most days.

“I hate how she couldn’t stop me from committing this atrocity. I hate how she couldn’t stop me from leaving her.

“Couldn’t or couldn’t be bothered to?

“I pity her heavily sometimes. She had so much faith in me. She gave and gave and gave. Like an idiot.

“I’ve no respect for idiots.

“I feel like I lost all respect for her even before I knew I was going to leave her. It’s just that, then you’re that well acquainted with someone… You just don’t respect them anymore, do you? You can’t. Every moment in their presence just makes them pitiful in your eyes. Lesser beings than they once were. I wonder if she felt that way too. About me. Not about herself. I am sure she did think badly of herself.

“I’ve never met anyone so brilliantly full of themselves that could be capable of so much all-consuming insecurity and self-hatred. No one else knew but I did. She didn’t trust any hands to be as capable and trustworthy as hers (except, probably, mine), no mind to think deeper, no decision-maker to be wiser. She was a God. Lest she should admit it, though. Often I would be amazed at how purely magnetic her clash of personality traits were. A Byronic heroine, with all the tools in her arsenal. The maddening pull she has on everything and everyone crossing her path, for one. The way life is like a bubble around her, all round and slippery and spinning in on itself. The way you just want to deck her in the face. Yeah. That’s about right.