An open letter to an former friend

(I post this reluctantly, having no desire to play the martyr.  But I've ranted in my head, into the empty house, even on paper, and nothing helps.  Maybe blogging about it will get her out of my head so I can move on.)  

For over twenty years, we were friends.  You claimed to not mind, and even to enjoy, supporting me as I struggled to rise above my programming.  You told me drinking scared you, that many of your kin had problems with it and you didn't want to join that club.  You told me your co-workers were jerks and losers.  For many of those years, people 'knew' we were a couple... a reasonable assumption, all things considered, but you were irate.  I used to tell my friends and family to not even joke about it around you.

Then you tell me one day that you've decided you're a lesbian, that a certain party who boasted about converting straight women was your sweetheart.  You jumped out of the closet feet first, waving the rainbow flag like a madman.  All those years, you had been insulted at the idea of being with me.  All those years, you had insisted you were straight as an arrow.  But when I got upset, it was my homophobia that was the problem.

You visited mutual friends and told them I never let you drink, that I never let you go out with your co-workers, that I was using you financially.  I never left a job, in all those years, without another lined up.  I bought you stuff with my Welfare when I'd been fired.  You told me to get bill money from my sister so you could go to a Star Trek Convention!  But I was freeloading off you?!  You got me a pager so you could keep track of where I was, but I had you on a leash?!

After I figured out our friendship was a lost cause and moved out, you continued to put our mutual friends in the middle.  You basically told at least one of them to choose between me or you. (I see that some of my friends on Facebook are also your friends and think about telling them the things you said about them back then.  But, childish as I am, I'm more mature than that.)  You tried to keep me from your father's funeral, even though your mother wanted me there.

So tell me, how is this my fault?  You lied to me for twenty years about - well, pretty much everything - but it's my fault we aren't friends anymore?  Sometimes I wonder if we were ever friends.  Maybe that was yet another thing you lied about.