Ruining people: reflecting back

Friend: I like reading your blog, btw. Who are K. and C.?

M.E.: K. and C. Ah, the blog doesn't even do the whole story justice. I didn't want to bog the story down with too many details, including that while all that was happening I was dating some other naif. I know that if I were to be on my death bed, the K./C. thing is the part of my life I would relive over and over again.

The best quality about C. at that time was the ability to attract K., with whom, of course, I was fascinated. True to my narcissism, it wasn't really because K. was great or anything but because I saw K. as being part of me. I mean, K. was interesting. K. had no sense of keeping personal things private, particularly to people like me who would use that information for evil. So vulnerable. K. still tells me the most random personal things. It's like a vampire movie where the love interest/victim is always traipsing along giving herself paper cuts, or tripping and scraping a knee, or cutting her finger while chopping onions, that sort of a thing. I think my favorite part was that K. was constantly providing me fodder for destruction without my having to work for it. I never ended up abusing that info because K. just seemed so hapless. K. would psychologically fall into my lap all the time. Even if K. wasn't telling me about random personal information, for some reason that info would just come to me, effortlessly, through other sources. It was such a head trip. Sometimes I wondered whether I myself was being set-up because things could not have gone more perfectly if they were intentionally designed. The power struggle was so imbalanced that I just sat back and watched most of the time, morbidly curious to see what else would reveal itself. That and I really started to see K. as my good twin, like in a total "Am I my brother's keeper" quandary of balancing desire to destroy with a sense of responsibility and desire for self-preservation. It was weird. There were so many interesting psychological angles going on, which was why everything, even the most mundane of conversations, was absolutely thrilling to participate in. Just thinking about it makes me salivate, makes me shiver. In fact, I almost avoid K. now because K. is like a dessert that is too rich, painfully pleasurable. K. gives me a stomachache.

Sometimes I still entertain the thought of telling K. everything, like maybe when K. moves away and we no longer have mutual friends. There were so, so many times when I wanted to confess to K., particularly at the beginning. Part of me, maybe like Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, really wanted something real to come from our interactions, whatever that might mean. I was genuinely fond of K., smitten even. I wanted to be sincere, I wanted to be loyal. I felt that it was almost cruel how the universe had turned K. over to me, a wolf in sheep's clothing. I really did worry about what toying with K. would do to me, like all those Roman era movies where emperors and statesmen were sacrificing/torturing the one person they loved. Why? Because to love something was such an unacceptable weakness? An intolerable invulnerability? I don't know where that impulse came from, but I recognized it in myself.

But it was a very rich life experience that has cemented in my mind who I am, my particular flaws, my sometimes sordid desires. It has given me a very real sense of self like nothing else had before or has after. Maybe I'll put a redacted version of this email on the blog as well. It's probably entertaining to get the back story a little better...