i miss the sparkly x

what do you do when someone you've been friends with for over 10 years begins to morph into someone nearly unrecognizable to you? do you just smile with silent complicity or do you begin to take several large steps backward or do you heed the call of responsibility and say the unpleasant things in hopes of handing a torch to your friend (take a look at the landscape of your life now, just take a look!) or do you hand over that torch and watch helplessly as they begin to set fire to 10 years of laughter and tears.

what do you do when your friend (let's call them "x") begins seeing someone and then promptly begins to exhibit signs of losing their own strongly developed sense of self and identity. with the new love x has begun to take on traits that i'd never seen in the previous 10 years. are these new traits x's traits that had been just so buried beneath the surface that they were denied even to x? or is x swimming in the murky muck of co-dependence? probably both.

the strangest thing to me is that i've never even met x's new love. and x has been seeing this person since the spring of 2005. over half a year ago. and x is a person that up until that time, i'd been seeing on roughly a weekly basis for the past 2 and a half years. we'd lost touch for a few years and then bang, we were friends again. the last time we lost touch, x had begun to spend a lot of time with some new friends. as x came out of seeing those new friends, i came back on the scene. so is this just a pattern? does x tire and bore of folks and i'm just 'lucky' that i was allowed back in?

i have written and re-written this entry many times. i feel like i'm giving away a lot of myself here and want to be o-so-cautious. x knows of this blog, but i think that x very rarely comes here. it's not like i'm writing this to open a dialog. x knows my feelings about the new love.

x knows that i can't stand the fact that the new love has shown violent tendencies (yelling, biting, hiting, bruising, throwing things, punching the wall) and x knows that i am not comfortable with the fact that x now finds themselves doing many of the same things. and x tells me about their own violent disfuction in a way that seems to me like, "see, my love is not the only fucked up one. i am pretty fucked up too! give me a cookie and hate on my new love less, will you?"

it seems that x (a sensitive and highly intelligent person) now feels that punching the person that fired you is a good and positive solution. when i objected to that logic, x came out with a very patronizing "i don't mean to put you down, but...." (i'm not an idiot... i know that when a sentence starts that way, it's like flashing a huge red sign that says, "it's so cute that you have an opinion, however, you are soooooooooo unaware when it comes to this matter, and let me show you just how silly you sound")

i miss x. i miss the old x. i must prepare for the fact that the old x is now gone. i wonder if the new x will still have room for my friendship? i wonder if i can sit by and watch this keep happening? or am i being selfish in wanting things to remain the same?

[music | tori amos, "hey jupiter"]