Have I ruined the best friendship I ever had? (V LONG STORY..)?

If you’re brave enough to read this story, please be brave enough to give me an honest answer as best you can.. Thanks.

This is kind of difficult to talk about, and i’ve asked questions skirting arount he issue before, but now i’m just gonna go full out and explain exactly whats gone on.

I met my friend when I was 19 and he was 14. It was 2005.

This was me back then: http://img199.image shack.us/i/14336233767610662511195.jpg/

And this was him then: http://img256.image shack.us/i/n1398381775304025837023.jpg/

We lived in the same town and we had mutual friends. I worked in a shop and lived above it and he lived in a foster home. I had been in a foster home too when I was 14 and we instantly had an innocent connection where I wanted to guide and look out for him and he became very clingy, but I didn’t care.

We had great conversations and hung out whenever we could with our other friends and the four of us became like a little family… really close friends, especially him and I.

Around that time I had been questioning my sexuality as well but it was something I wanted to keep to myself. I am still really questioning my sexuality now as I have had experiences with both guys and girls but after trauma from my childhood I am in the middle of a 2-year psychotherapy program where I am discovering my true identity and healing the pain of the past.

The gist of what happened to me as a kid is that my dad (who I found out later was my step-dad) was a sadistic, manipulative, humiliating and abusive man towards me and left me a trembling mess by the time I was put into foster care about 14. You can understand why I have disturbing thoughts and don’t know whether i’m straight or not but I will figure it out in the end.

Anyway my friend and I became extremely close and we both agreed we wanted to know each other forever. I think we found each other because psychologically I needed to help him like I wished someone had helped me when I felt so alone as a kid and in foster care. I see how lost he is and understand why he is so rebellious and misunderstood. I feel a great sense of responsibility towards him.

He would climb through my window after school or on weekends and get into my bed and ask me to hug him. We were very affectionate and although that seems weird to people, we didnt care and again, it was innocent and by this point I had decided I would take a bullet for him rather than let him come to harm. He told me about how his mum had died when he was 10 and his dad turned to drink and eventually he was split up from his big brother and little sister and put into a childrens home.

But he did come to harm and I couldn’t do anything about it. Social Services moved him away after a year of us knowing each other and we lost regular contact. I became very depressed and tried to get on with my life but all I could think about was getting in touch with him and waiting until he was 16 so we could live together.

By aged 17 in 2008 we met up at my new flat for the first time in over a year since we’d last spoken face to face. It was the best and worst month of my life. I was so glad to see him and to catch up and I could tell that he wanted to repair our friendship as he told me that when he saw me "something clicked in his head". I take that as he remembered how close we had been.

But as I began to re-get to know the new him I couldn’t believe how much had changed in a year and a half. He told me he had gotten into drugs, namely coke, speed, pills and weed, even crack at one point. The people he considered his "closest" friends were men in their 30’s and 40’s who encouraged him to rob shops and peoples homes with them, which made sense because, that was why he had told me he was on the run from the Police and was destined to go to prison.

I was so gutted.

For the first time I was beginning to get paranoid that he was using me and that I still loved him more than anyone in the world and had thought about him every day, but maybe I had just become some prop for him when he needed to use me like a mug.

We did have some really good chats but he would just suddenly become self-concieous and change, like there’s 2 of him, especially when we were around other people and he’d show off in public. One night we had a nice chat and I felt like I had made a breakthrough with him and gained a bit of respect back from him (because i’m not really a fighter, he obviously didnt know whether to respect me or not) and I went for a bath. When I came out of the bath he seemed to be asleep on my bed and I slipped in onto my side and started playing on my phone. He turned over and burrowed his head into my arm and put his arm around me. I froze because I didn’t know whether he meant to do it or not. He might of just been asleep and I didn’t want him to wake up and freak out because I was hugging him back… pathetic sit
situation so soon into seeing him, and it was ironic that I was trying to get him to see the importance in being himself all this time when he was the only one right now with the social skills to save our skins from anything kicking off. The thug asked for a fag and took two out the packet and threw one to his mate. I remember sitting there completely comfortable, even though the thug was banging his hand on the table every so often, and thinking, ‘what would I do if this guy started on us right now? Would I really be able to protect my friend? Or would I run for my life like a p*ssy? I wonder if i’m the one in the wrong and actually I should be more like my friend rather than being a self-righteous pr*ck and putting him down all the time, slating his addiction to his own fighting reputation, when really I should maybe be relieved that he can look after himself in these kind of scenarios.’

That night we wrote off the thug as a tw*t and went home to have a really good, in depth chat
It was amazing. I nearly told him everything I wanted to say. I said how I felt I never got to say goodbye to him when he was taken away, and that i’m still ‘there’ in my head. I said that i’m not ashamed anymore to admit that i’ve thought about him every single day since then, and that I made a promise to myself to protect him back then, and that I feel like a failure.

He told me that it’s not my fault that he’s ended up the way he has, and that he’s always known deep down that i’ve always been there for him. He said he’s had to adapt to change, he’s had to get into the things that he has, but that it was the kind of lifestyle he was looking for when he was younger because it was cool and hard and the drugs and drink just attracted him and it all turned into a complete mess.

I told him that when I got those texts off his 30/40 year old friends, I thought they were from him and it hurt me so much. He told me that he didn’t even know the texts had been sent to me until I replied
with my own rap, which p*ssed him off and thats why we fell out.

I told him what the raps said and he was genuinely surprised and had no idea about some of them.

I said I love you more than they do, and he said I know, I know you do. You do.

He said he remembers when he was 14 and I was 19 hanging out in my room together, and how he felt he wanted to stay there forever.

I said I fell in love with him and have even thought to myself at some points, "Am I gay?"

He hesitated and quickly said, "No you’re not gay. I don’t think you’re gay. We’ve looked at porn together and i’ve seen you around girls. You’re not gay."

I stayed silent.

Later that night he got a bit of A3 paper out and a pen and told me he’d learnt how to write his feelings down in some therapy he had started going to but stopped going. He sectioned it out so that it said what his problems were, where he thought they came from, and why they are bad for him. Then in the last column he left a space for what
he could do about it.

He said he’d fill it out first while i’m asleep, and then in the morning I had to fill in my stuff underneath.

I woke up the next morning and he had written about drugs, drink, fighting and using people. He had basically written that he’s rebelling against life and that he wated to see that people are genuinely there for him and therefore do not need to be used.

I wrote my bits in, my advice to him for his problems, but ironically he told me that’s not what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to talk about my feelings, not my answers to his feelings… I never did write down my feelings.

He drew a tatoo the next day and said we should both get it as a mark of our friendship. It was a boxing glove with a chain around it saying ‘FRIENDSHIP…EVALAST…4EVA’.

He then showed me three tatoos of peoples names I hadn’t even heard of. One was a girl he had been seeing, the other was her older sister, and the other was the older sisters son Stephen. He said
He said he hates both the girls because they have become ’scag heads’ and he kidnapped Stephen, he’s 13 years old, to rescue him from them.

He talked about how his mum died in the street because she was an alcoholic and had drunk too much, and how some guy mugged her while she lay dying on the floor. For the first time he told me that she was never around anyway, and had actually run away for a few years when he was really young so when she came back he didn’t know who his mum was.

He related all this to Stephen and I felt really really sad for him. He was on the run from the police again, but this time it wasn’t for fighting or stealing or drugs. It was for doing something that, actually, i’m really proud of him for. Okay he went about doing it in the wrong way because you have to be so careful with a minor. But his intentions. His intentions were amazing and I just told him I love him.

He told me he loves me so much. He said I love you as much as my little man Stephen.
I know why i’m doing it it’s because of you it’s because you showed me how. It’s exactly the same. In a few months Stephen will be 14 and i’ll be 19, that’s like me and you isn’t it?
I told him "I want you to love him more than you love me."

And I meant that.

But then the next day I woke up feeling empty.

We got drunk, he p*ssed me off with his attitude again, and I remembered what I needed to tell him before he handed himself into the Police.

We were on top of a hill in the old town we used to live in, with two old friends we used to hang around with, and I stood up and looked directly at him.

I said "Listen to what i’m gonna tell you."

"I’m proud to be bisexual."

"I’ve been in love with you for a long time now."

"And I never wanna see you again."
This picture was taken last week: http://img402.image shack.us/i/48518151.jpg/

Posted in children psychotherapy