You invaded my life, my home, my safety, my heart, my possibilities.

I was falling in love with him. We were having so much fun figuring each other out. We didn’t argue. We were intellectually matched. We had similar humor. He was quiet and I was the loud. The balance in the middle was the divine attraction, the push and pull of us craving the other to experience pieces of ourselves we had never met before.

We laughed the night I came home from the dentist drooling because I couldn’t feel part of my face. We froze because the heat was so slow to pick up at night. He snuck out to the kitchen in the middle of the night to grab a brownie and I could hear his teeth crunch into it which wasn’t supposed to happen. Clearly a bad recipe and it made us laugh in the middle of the night. He remembered everything I said and could bring something up months later. He listened to me. We were so fun. We were discovering happy.

I hadn’t known much about you. You were the ex who moved away. I was The now and ready to move on. You weren’t a factor in my life, or his anymore.

But you came back. You missed the attention. You needed to be the center of a universe, any universe I think. You took a risk and it didn’t pan out so you ran home looking for the safety of your past. You didn’t care about him or his happiness. You just wanted what you wanted. I was small collateral you didn’t care existed. You came running back wanting to be with him because it was your safe and familiar. Never mind the pain it brought him. You teased him with your eating disorder and made him think you would die if he didn’t turn his attention to you. And so he did. But it wasn’t easy for him. He was invested with me. Leaving me for you wasn’t at all a no brainer for him like you think it was. He was torn up and would continue being a part of my life for several more years.

Common sense tells us we should be mad at the man who leaves, not the woman who lured him away. Trust me, I was mad at him. Not for the betrayal or the loss so much but more for his naiveté and blind trust in you because I knew he deserved better than your vapid offering. He is a trusting man. His guilt is very easy to manipulate. I think somewhere in his upbringing he was made to believe the happiness of others depended solely on his actions and responses to them. He would never and has never turned away a woman declaring need. You knew that and used it. I was mad at him for not listening to me when I warned him about what you were doing. You valued only yourself. I valued him.

But you, yeah, I am mad as hell at you because you knew what you were doing to him and you did it anyway. You knew you just had to threaten to starve yourself or put your fingers down your throat and he’d be in the car on his way. And even when it eventually didn’t work out for you the second time around, you made sure to keep him around by introducing him to your friend. If you weren’t going to have him, you were going to find a way to control who would.

I saw you. I still see you. In fact, your behavior is what eventually helped me see moments I tried to manipulate him and I was ashamed of myself for that. Looking at what you did made me stop doing what I did. I walked away and didn’t come back. I let him move on with his life even at moments I didn’t want to. But I loved him more than myself. I don’t think you know what that is.

You are the kind of debase woman who makes women unable to trust each another. You have no girls code, no empathy, no lines. You adore yourself. You hate yourself. You think of little else but yourself. I wonder what your daughter learns from you. You know how to make other women become the second choice and spend their lives second guessing themselves. You are the kind of woman who would step over the injured body of another woman if it advanced you to your goal.

I think every woman has a little of you in our souls but we must make choices thousands of times as to who we want to be inaction. Many of us can suppress that demon to do what’s right and to lift each other up. We believe there is a space for all of us. You just want all the spaces to yourself. You get your husband but you want to be sure another husband or two is paying attention to “sweet and cute, adorable” you. Simply put, you are despicable. You make all women look bad.

For years I beat myself up for not being enough you. Not thin enough, not pretty enough, not historical enough, the wrong group of friends….how silly. You are a “townie” who took one shot at a life and quit only a few months later to go back to the life you knew and never again move forward. There is actually nothing attractive about that. It’s actually rather sad and small and timid. You take big swipes for what you want but you do it from the confines of a cage you built yourself. You aren’t such a formidable threat behind your little bars, are you, average girl? You couldn’t survive a day in my world. After all these years hating you, I think I am actually content knowing I could likely decimate you with nothing more than a sentence. And I would be doing it on behalf of all the good women out there who have been forced to survive women like you invading their lives.