I Was the Toxic Friend
It took losing three good people to see the pattern was me.
Priya left my birthday dinner before the cake came out, and I told the whole table it was because she could not stand watching other people be happy.
People laughed, a little, the way you laugh when a joke has teeth and you are glad they are not in your leg. Then the waiter set down the cake with a single candle shaped like a question mark, because the bakery had run out of number candles, and I remember thinking the universe was being cute.
I did not understand yet that the question was addressed to me.
Priya was the third friend I lost in two years. Before her there was Dev. Before Dev, Sana. Three separate people, three separate exits, and I had a clean, reasonable story for each one in which I was the patient adult and they were the sensitive ones who could not handle honesty.
Dev called me the night he got his promotion, the one he had been circling for four years. I said congratulations, and then I said, must be nice... and then I talked for forty minutes about my manager, my rent, my back pain.
At his wedding I gave a toast that was really a roast, and when his new wife did not laugh I decided she had no sense of humor.
He stopped calling slowly... the way a tap stops dripping. One day I noticed the silence had been there for eight months.
Sana told me something private once, sitting on my kitchen floor at midnight, the kind of thing you only say out loud to one person. Within a week I had told our mutual friend Ritu, and I had a noble reason ready: I just wanted people to support her. That was the phrase I used. Support her. As if I had done charity work and not treason.
Each time, I grieved loudly. I told anyone who would listen that people leave, that loyalty is dead, that I always give more than I get. I sat by my window on rainy evenings feeling like the last honest woman in a dishonest city.
Then came the voice note.
It was in our old college group chat, from Priya, clearly meant for a different chat, deleted within a minute. But I had already played it. Her voice was tired, not cruel, which somehow made it worse. She said, please do not tell her anything real. She will turn it into a competition, and then somehow you will end up comforting her about your own bad news.
My first reaction was fury. I drafted a reply the length of a court judgment. I had bullet points. I had receipts... or I thought I did, so at two in the morning I started scrolling back through years of our messages to collect them.
That scroll ruined me.
I found seventeen separate messages where I had replied to someone's good news with the words must be nice. Seventeen.
I found Sana telling me she was scared about a medical test, and me responding with a paragraph about my own doctor being rude. I found myself asking follow up questions about exactly one category of event: my own dramas. Dev's father's surgery got a thumbs up emoji. My sprained ankle got a three day live commentary.
The pattern was not happening around me. The pattern was me.
Nobody believes they are the storm. Everyone just remembers the weather being terrible wherever they went.
I sat with that for a long time, and then I did the thing I had mocked other people for doing: I found a therapist. Her name was Kavita, she kept a bowl of tamarind candy on her desk, and in our fourth session she asked me a question I still hear in my sleep.
What do you get out of being the wronged one?
I wanted to say nothing... The true answer was: everything. Being the victim got me attention without risk. If I was always the one being abandoned, I never had to look at what I did in the room before the door slammed. Grievance was my native language, learned early, in a house where love was a ledger and someone was always in debt.
I could not say any of this out loud at first, so I wrote it. Ugly, unpublishable sentences in a notebook, then less ugly ones. Most of them circled the same subject, which is how I ended up reading and writing poems about forgiveness, the kind you have to ask for rather than grant, which it turns out is a much smaller and harder genre. Later, when I could stand it, I wrote about healing too, though I refuse to use that word in conversation because it sounds like something a scented candle would say.
Then came the apologies. Kavita helped me build them like load bearing walls: name what you did, no explanation attached, no request for absolution, no clause beginning with the word but. I wrote three letters.
Dev replied in nine words. Thank you for this. I wish you well, truly. That is a door closing, but closing gently, and I have learned to count it as kindness. Sana never replied at all, and she owes me nothing, and I mean that now in a way I could not have meant it two years ago.
Priya asked to meet for coffee.
She stirred her cup for a long time before she spoke. I never needed you to be perfect, she said. I needed you to be glad for me, once, without a footnote. I looked at my own cup because looking at her face was not survivable, and I said, I know... I am learning to be glad out loud. She nodded and did not hug me when we left, and the not hugging was honest, and I respected it more than a hug.
We text now. She answers warmly and does not call, and that is fair. Trust is not a light switch, it is a plant, and I am the one who kept forgetting to water it for a decade, so I do not get to complain about the pace of the leaves.
One of the notebook poems eventually left the notebook. I entered it into a monthly poetry contest at Writory, mostly to prove the new version of me existed somewhere outside my own head, in front of strangers, where I could not perform. It did not win anything. Publishing your flaws under your real name is its own prize, and I say that with only mild bitterness.
This year my birthday dinner had four people at a small table. Nobody was the punchline. When someone shared good news, I asked a follow up question, and then another one, and I felt the strangest sensation, like stretching a muscle that had been in a cast for years.
The question mark candle is still in my kitchen drawer. I never threw it out. I keep it the way other people keep photographs, so that I remember exactly what was asked of me that night, and so that I never again get the answer wrong.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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