Thanks for your response! I don't believe that I am crass at all. I have several negative attributes, but I don't feel that that is one of them. :)

25-year-old female here. I've always dated guys but have been interested in girls as well, and in my junior year of high school, I became completely, ridiculously infatuated with my best friend (at the time). She was brilliant in both the sciences and arts, a dancer, a writer, and an engineering student, and physically, she was a perfect cross between Alexis Bledel and Zooey Deschanel. She was a sensitive soul with a sharp wit, an extremely dark sense of humor, an entertainingly cloudy disposition, and an openness to life that I had never seen in anyone before or since. She also had severe borderline personality disorder. She was "different" and socially awkward, and didn't have many friends in high school. Of course, I was delighted to fill this void, and she freely let me in to fill the center of her world. We were inseparable the first few months of my junior and her senior year. I was socially awkward but very pretty as well, and was slowly climbing up the "popularity ladder" when we became close; however, I let all my other friends drop away as I fell harder and harder for this enigmatic girl. Anyway, when I let her know how I felt, she expressed some hesitation, but said she actually felt the same way about me. Slowly, we forged a quivering apparition of a romantic relationship.

But something was wrong. She was quickly becoming manipulative and cruel, and she knew that she had me right at her feet, spiraling ever downward into the warm, dark sea of my lovesick dreams. I became increasingly nervous around her, and honestly, I forgot how to act. I couldn't act "like myself," like the me she had befriended and for whom she had developed feelings. But instead of actually being a best friend, semi-girlfriend, whatever, and helping me to not feel so worried and scared around her, she fucked with my head and life at every opportunity. I don't want to go into those details, but she certainly wreaked utter havoc on my soul. It was during one of my more desperate days, during which I was trying to make her laugh, to earn the scrap of a smile that had come so easily in earlier days, that she called me "crass." "What's wrong?" I said. "I don't know," she said, her eyes drifting, unfocused. "You just seem really crass today." The words made my heart physically throb with pain, resonating the horror implicit in her statement. It struck me harder than any of her previous insults. I was crass. I was no longer "the person who had restored her faith in humanity", as she had called me when we first became close; I was just...a crass idiot. A pathetic fool who had, in the throes of desire, shaken off all culture, all awareness, all sense of self.

Things went downhill rapidly after that, and culminated in her dating some random guy from the school's engineering team, which caused her to break it (whatever "it" is) off with both me AND her ex-boyfriend, who, unbeknownst to me, she had been dating throughout our entire relationship. We went off to different colleges and haven't seen each other since. She did reach out to me over Facebook about eight years ago, saying that she was sorry for being a "jerk" (or some flippant word like that which didn't even begin to describe the depth and multidimensionality of her cruelty to me), and that she knew that all I had wanted was to be her friend, etc. I responded by informing her of how deeply she had actually hurt me, and how I did not ever plan on forgiving her or communicating with her ever again. Of course, in the fashion of a true mindfucker, she responded with some bullshit retort mocking me about my "recovery process." I never responded.

Anyway. Almost 9 years since all this happened, I'm engaged to a man I love very much. It's funny, though; outwardly, I give off this impression of being a lily-white, attractive, utterly conventional straight girl, and very few people know of the strange fire that used to burn inside me for a girl whose heart I once thought was my home. The years have eroded the worst of the pain, but the memory is still there; open, wet, raw. A part of me still hates myself for making her hate me. Was it actually my fault? I don't think so, but I don't know if I'll ever truly believe that.

But in any case. I'm sorry for this extremely long post. But thanks for listening.