Shall I give up on the person I love the most?

How can I stop my feelings for my male friend ruining my life (..LONG STORY..)?
Have I ruined the best friendship I ever had or am I right to think this guy in the closet? I have been so patient and in love with him for a long time, and I will never confront him about his sexuality, but I need to find an answer to be able to move on because this is killing me.

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 situation I know but he was that homophobic and had become that anti-affection between males that I just decided to freeze, until he moved back and over to his side a few minutes later.

After 3 weeks of him staying at my new place, on the last night before he had agreed with me to hand himself in, I became so paranoid and confused that (while drunk) I had a bit of a breakdown and threw everything I could all around my flat and then ran off. We just couldn’t communicate anymore because he was so "rude boy chav masculine" and he had been taught that talking about his feelings is gay. But I KNOW the real him deep down and I became even more intent on helping him remember and to get him off the drugs and just generally feel good about himself and be the decent, amazing intelligent guy I know he is.
Leaving him at the train station and saying good bye was difficult, and as the train approached he kind of murmured "do you wanna come with me?" Without really knowing what he meant I said "**** no" and he got on the train without really saying goodbye but shouted from the carrage "see ya later mate".

The next day I started to get raps by text from his friends, in their 30’s and 40’s, basically insinuating that i’m gay and weak and pathetic, and how dare I start smashing things up around their ‘boy’. They had known him about 7 months, by this point I had known him 4 years and never questioned that I loved him more than they can even imagine.

This is us the night before he left in 2008: http://img641.image shack.us/i/63612078.png/

Over the following months I felt really down and didn’t know what to think. I was out of work, depressed, falling out with all my friends and that’s when I seeked help from the Doctor, who put me forward for Pyschotherapy.
I also tracked down one of my friends mates on facebook who I had heard him talk about. He had told me a story of how this lad had come onto him and asked if they could be boyfriends. The way he told the story was that he punched the boy and ran off and never spoke to him again. When I started talking to the guy he said that he didn’t punch him, he did run off, but he had met up with my friend a ffew times since then to hang out. Apparently my friend had "forgiven" him because he had only been experiementing bicurious… something I needed to know because by now I was realising that my feelings had become really deep, love and attraction sort of feelings on top of everything else.

So my friend came back tp see me eventually 10 months later (Christmas 2009 just gone) after getting out of prison for robbery to come and see me. When I opened the door to him he flung his arms round me and said he had been waiting for me to come online for ages because he really needed a chat with me.
I noticed he had a really prominent scar across his neck and, although he was putting on his confident rude boy front to my friends who were with us, saying that the cut on his throat was from a fight with his alcoholic dad and bragging about how many other fights he had been in, I could sense how lost he was deep down and I knew something was up. He took me into the bathroom and told me he had bi-polar disorder. He told me that the cut on his neck was self-inflicted and that he had tried to kill himself. I lifted his arms and he had about 7 or 8 scars on each of his wrists, and below them I could see fainter, older scars so I knew he had been hurting himself for a long time. He looked at me with tears in his eyes and told me he’s a freak.

I looked him back in the eye and told him he’s not a freak and that he’s f**king amazing and that I love him and have always been there for him and always will be, and gave him a hug.
But he changed again. He went back into petulant, bullying child mode (not to me but to others and to himself). We went to see some old friends whom we used to hang out with and they all felt pretty weirded out by him. I think he enjoyed being able to alienate himself to them, to prove "how far he’d come" and that he wasn’t little any more and could intimidate people. I genuinely think he was proud of the lifestyle he was living, even though after he could admit that something wasn’t right.

We stood at the train station late at night coming back from seeing these friends and he was still messing around and laughing at how fat one of our friends had become and stuff. Then he suddenly stopped talking and looked down at the ground and said "i’ve just become self-aware of how i’m acting."

I simply said, "just be yourself mate."

And we stood on the train track, stupidly I know, looking into the distance silently.
We both knew the score I think, what my feelings were for him, what his situation was and how he feels there is no way out from his hell. And I said, "Shall we just stand here."

He sad "yeah". It was a kind of strange feeling.

We got on the train and he went home the next day.

This was us then (take spaces out to see pic): http:// img696.image shack.us/i/20583096.png/
And now we come to this month. He told me he was coming to stay and I was determined to tell him exactly what I thought of the whole situation; him, me, the way he’s living his life, and our relationship. I have found so much strength from Psychotherapy and realised that this was not a healthy relationship, my therapist helped me realise that every time he comes to see me, he leaves me with a load of sh*t, which causes anxiety in me, and then he leaves again and I do nothing but worry and think about him and the past.

I also came to realise the root cause for the reason I am so fixated on him…that it’s somehow making up for my past, showing that i’m not the same bad person that my dad was, that I could act out in a way that could care and put right all those f*cked up thoughts and experiences that haunt me subconceously and impede and ruin my life on a daily basis.
So he gets off the train and I see him coming. He doesn’t know i’m waiting for him because he should have arrived some time earlier. I followed him as he made his way from the station to my flat. And I watched him.

He had trendy jeans on, he was looking really skinny and he was wearing a black hoodie with hood up covering his face slouched forward and his hands in his pockets. I watched how he walked. He seemed to be preparing himself to see me in his mannerisms. He was shrugging his shoulders up and down like a fighter before a match, psyking himself up or something. Loosening his body and freeing himself up. Kind of like a dressing down like he could act his real self. I remember him saying once that he loves coming to see me because he feels like a kid again. I remember thinking when he said that that what he really needed to realise was that he could be himself around me and forget the sharade of gangs and knives and drugs and prison. I shouted his name from behind him and he
impulsively shouted my name back really loud and excited. Again it was great seeing him but this time I knew I had something to do, as in I had to put a full stop to all this madness and tell him how I felt, no matter what.

We walked to my flat and he started the whole bragging thing a bit, like he didn’t really know any other way to act, but I could tell he was happy. He was smiling and laughing and that’s when I noticed the scar going right down across his chin. He told me he’d been glassed randomly by someone he considered to be his mate. There was silence. Then he looked at me and said "don’t worry I will f*cking get him back." I just rolled my eyes.

He said he had been sick and fallen asleep in the train toilet and ended up in the middle of nowhere and that’s why he was so late. He flipped from one conversation to another excitedly and now he was telling me that he’s pretty much completely off drugs and doesn’t hang around with the same 30 and 40 year old men anymore, saying
he’d realised what they were like. I stayed silent still even though I was happy to hear that. Then he carried on trying to ignore the silence blurting out that he had 10 pounds left and wanted to take me for a drink.

Then he randomly stopped mid sentance and said "you’re not happy with me are you? there’s something wrong." I said "what makes you think that" as we started walking to the pub, and he said "I know you."

At the pub we both loosened up a bit although I found it quite hard to get my words out, I always feel so alive when i’m around him it feels like its so important everything I do, because I know i’m gonna reflect on it loads later, and regret what I didn’t do right or didn’t say. And that’s when I told him I needed to speak to him. He said "what about?" and I said "Not now. But we need to have a chat. I need to tell you something."
A drunk, intimidating thug, bigger than both of us then came and sat with us and ruined the mood. My friends shoulders henched up and his voice deepened and the two of them started to talk, even though they were strangers, and the thug had clearly come over to intimidate us. It was a really annoying 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 how to fix the problems.

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 wanted 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 hates both the girls because they have become ’scag heads’ and he kidnapped Stephen, he’s 13 years old, to rescue him from them.
In this conversation my friend finally opened up 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 to look after him by the way you look after me. I want you to meet him. He tests me in ways that make me realise what you had to put up with me. I love you both so much. 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/
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END OF STORY
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*Update*

Apparently after I told him and left he reacted angrily, and confused, and embaressed, and sympathetic towards me (a complete mixture which suggest he didn’t know how to react BUT he was most bothered about not looking gay himself apparently).

The two girls who were with us when I told him told me that he said, "i knew it i f*ckin knew it. i knew it from the start".

"i’m confused"

and

"f*ckin pr*ck im gonna punch him. He’s known me since I was 14 thats f*cking sick"

and

"why do gays always fancy me?"

and

"i dont care if hes bi or gay i just wish he’d told me from the start……. no actually he lied to me all this time"

and

"it all makes sense"

and

"i bet he’s done things with guys. He’s got loads of gay mates…"

"I’m confused"

"as long as he doesnt come on to me i dont care."

he then got a train and handed himself in the next day
—————————————

It’s been three weeks since I told him and he sent me a message on facebook at the weekend.

It said,

" —- u f*kin weird bruv sort ya self out init "

——————————

i replied:

" nar i aint weird

if u dnt wna sort this out n b m8s delete me off ya facebook "

——————————

i got a message back from his profile again, this time saying:

" this is his m8 here. *** about like that again ill come over an c u bruv. and it wont be pretty. "

——————————

I wrote back today saying:

" so much for m8s 4 life — gettin ur mates to threaten me

tell him to stay out of it coz I would take a kicking 4 u i would take a ***** bullet 4 u

do u wanna be m8s or not? im sorry 4 all d weird **** ur ma bro n i want things 2 go bak 2 normal "
my therapist has told me to stop talking to him and try and move on, at least for now and give it time.

WHAT DO I DO NOW?

Posted in children psychotherapy