I remember calling you my friend. I told you my deepest secrets and you trusted me with your's. We laughed and loved like sisters, and we spent our time watching awful horror movies together while laying on that damn couch that smelled of cheap wine and dog. I don't know if the dog I was smelling was coming from your three pit bulls or if it was you. 

I remember confiding in you, I believed in you, and the worst part is, is that I didn't let anyone tell me otherwise. My mother said you were rotten to the core, like the apple in the garden of Eden. Sure, you look sweet when I picked you for a friend, but when I bit into you I was made painfully aware of reality, just like Eve. 

It took some time before I bit, some time that I savored because "maybe they are lying" and "she would never say those things about me, her friend, her confidant" kept ping-ponging back and forth, back and forth in an endless stream of anger and frustration and ultimate forgiveness because I was scared. I was scared that without you I would be friendless, but I would learn later that I had been friendless all along. 

Those people were wrong, they were the liars, but never you. Never the one that I called friend. Never would you ever call me a bitch behind my back and never would you claim that I was the one that changed because clearly it was you that changed. Never did I say you changed, but I watched it happen. I watched a beautiful caterpillar disappear inside a chrysalis of spite and rage and hormones and only a few months later you had turned on a dime, metamorphasizing NOT into a beautiful butterfly but an ugly, insufferable moth. 

But hell, moths need love too, right? 

So I stayed. I stayed because I was scared of moving on, of being by myself. But really, it was your words that spread like venom through the veins of an infected piece of prey that made rumors circulate about the school that made me take that first bite, not into pleasantries as promised by the well-polished husk that you had so convincingly altered but into malice and lies and pain. 

You changed me. Thank you. You made me take a step back and realize that the world is full of scams. The world is not pleasant as it appears, because in every kiss, every hug, every tear and every laugh, there is some hidden meaning, some mental switch that can be thrown to toss, so carelessly, aside memories and barbeques and those moments when we realized we weren't that different because two different men had used their power and influence to scar the both of us in our separate lives and I thought, "no never could she call me a bitch behind my back, because she knows the shit I have been through and I know the shit she's been through and it is the glue that bonds us together". 

That was all wrong, wasn't it, girl?