Guess I should share mine too.

A few years ago, my then-best friend and I got into a silly argument about texting. She kept sending me middle-of-the-night texts about random stuff she'd find on the web. I had to remind her several times a year that I didn't have a smart phone with data, so texting me URLs was useless. And like, could she please not send me that kind of stuff at 2 AM? I didn’t like putting my phone on silent at night (just in case someone genuinely needed to contact me), and so it was irritating to be woken up by links to 9GAG.

So one night she does it yet again, and I reply back with something like, “Hey, please don’t text me in the middle of the night unless it’s an emergency.”

Next morning, she’s screaming at me over Yahoo Messenger, saying that my response text had woken HER up and had terrified her because she thought that there was an emergency. Um. She then proceeded to deny that she’d ever sent me a text in the first place, and acted like I was completely crazy for thinking so, and that it was horrible of me to send that reply text.

A little while later that same day, another mutual friend of ours contacts me. He’s confused, because my friend is writing to him and saying really bizarre stuff about me that he doesn’t understand.

He copies and pastes the messages that she wrote – and I couldn’t believe what I was reading. She had been complaining to him about how nutso I apparently am, and she claimed to know the reason for it...she said that I was only acting like this because my “loving cousin” must have drugged me and given me brain damage.

This made me see red, because I knew what she was actually referring to (albeit very badly). A few months prior to this, I had met my long-lost half-brother who had been put up for adoption before I was born. I spent a few weekends traveling to the city he lived in, got to know him a bit, but ultimately cut off contact when it became evident that he was a major creep and a bonafide sex offender. I was pretty upset by the event, but no actual harm ever came to me except for sadness over the lost connection.

My best friend was the only person I confided to about it, and I had told her how depressed and frightened it had made me feel. That was it. I couldn’t believe that she was twisting what I’d gone through into something so horrendously offensive and trying to use it against me just because of a fight over a fucking text message.

(For hell’s sake, she couldn’t even remember that he was a half-brother, not a cousin? WTF.)

So I wrote back to my so-called best friend, telling her that I knew all about the “loving cousin” bullshit she’d been spewing. She completely denied it and insisted that I was lying, until I told her that our friend had forwarded me the messages that she herself had written. She then started freaking out about how HER trust had been betrayed (by our mutual friend). I couldn’t fucking believe it.

Unfortunately, even this wasn’t enough for me to end the friendship immediately, because I’m an idiot (and because our mutual friend thought she might have some kind of mental illness, and convinced me to have compassion for her instead).