A few days ago, I was sitting in our hotel room in France when I decided to see if there were any filtered private messages for me. Every once in awhile, I get a message from some dude looking to hook a sucker. A couple of years ago, I got hate mail via private message, in which an anti-choice male decided to invite me to go die and called me a fat, murderous cunt. You’d think after getting those kinds of messages from strangers, I’d learn my lesson.

Well… this year, I got a private message from a family member of my former best friend from childhood. At one time, her brother and I were Facebook friends, but I decided to delete him because I found out that his sister had not only done some very hurtful things somewhat recently, but she’d also double crossed me on my wedding day. I blocked her and unfriended him, since he was never on Facebook anyway. I figured we wouldn’t have anything to talk about, since her sister had made it clear that she wasn’t a friend of mine, and I didn’t necessarily want her having access to my page via his. Having known her for many years, I know that she’s not above lurking to get information and/or gossip.

I wrote about the incident that caused me to finally decide to do the social media purge in my old blog, but I don’t really feel like rehashing what she did on this blog. It’s a very painful memory, and I have discovered that not everyone reads this blog for innocent reasons. Suffice to say, that day, I ended a 33 year history with someone with whom I share many childhood memories. She had once called me her best friend, then stabbed me in the back and put me in the position of awkwardly having to explain that we’re no longer friends to people who had known us as friends back in the day.

My ex friend’s brother said he’d been “cleaning up his timeline” and noticed that I had left him a greeting (and it would have been well over seven years ago that I did that, but technically he’s right). And he wanted to let me know what his sister is up to… she’s moved to another state to take a new job. Her husband and daughter are finishing the school year in Virginia and, I guess, are going to move in the summer.

In the past, I would have been tempted to respond to his message. It actually made me kind of sad that I couldn’t. You see, he mentioned my ex friend’s daughter’s name in the message, but my ex friend hadn’t even had enough regard for me to tell me she’d been pregnant, let alone tell me that she had a daughter or what her daughter’s name was. I had to accidentally find that out from someone else… someone who had assumed we were still friends and passed along the information to me, thinking I’d know. When the mutual friend had passed the information about ex friend’s daughter to me, I hadn’t realized the relationship we’d had together had changed as much as it obviously had. I was initially shocked and devastated; although after thinking about it, ultimately I wasn’t surprised.

Later, I discovered some other really nasty, inappropriate, spiteful behavior on her part. It was kept from me by my husband, who thought maybe he’d misinterpreted it and wanted to spare me some pain. I could have forgiven her for not telling me about her baby. It’s not the first time she’s done something like this to a person she’d once called a “friend”– someone other than me, that is. She’d kept the news of her engagement from her ex boyfriend, a guy she still considered a “friend”. I thought it was ridiculous, since they’d broken up years ago. But she said that if her ex knew about her nuptials, it would “ruin” the “friendship”. I guess her reasoning for not telling me about her child was similar. Maybe she thought I’d be jealous or try to upstage her somehow, although if that’s what she really thought of me, she clearly didn’t see me as a friend. That’s not how a friend behaves. I couldn’t forgive the way she behaved at my wedding, though… even though I found out about it years later.

I have now come to the conclusion that I don’t want her in my life. However, other people seem to think I should know her business. Besides our mutual friend, who wrote to me twice about her before I rather firmly explained that I no longer considered my ex friend a friend (though I didn’t go into why) and didn’t want to hear more about her, I also once heard from her ex boyfriend, a guy I had neither seen nor spoken to in years. He had contacted me, ostensibly because he had a book that I had lent my ex friend years ago and she’d never returned. He wanted to know if I wanted the book back. I suspect she put him up to contacting me, since he’d have no reason to otherwise. I wasn’t “buddies” with her ex boyfriend. I was pleasant enough, but didn’t dish about the ex friend, and I told him to keep the book, since I had replaced it years ago.

This time, the flying monkey is apparently her brother… and I don’t believe for a minute that he got the idea to write to me on his own. I was friendly enough with him when I was a kid, but again, we weren’t buddies or anything. He’s never written to me before, never even responded to that random Facebook greeting from years ago, and I have no idea why he’d write to me now, unless she put him up to it.

It makes more sense that I’d hear from my former friend’s ex boyfriend than her brother. In fact, I almost wonder if she was on her brother’s computer or something and decided to reach out to me using his account. I wouldn’t put it past her, but I also wouldn’t put it past her to summon her “flying monkeys”. Flying monkeys are people a narcissist uses to do their dirty work. They often get deployed when the narcissist is feeling cowardly and wants to test the waters. I’m not stupid, though, and I’ve seen this shit before. Narcissists are masters at it. It’s like they studied the same textbook. But then, if you’re around enough narcissistic types, you sort of become “vaccinated” as you start to recognize their bullshit for what it is.

This sudden reaching out technique is called “Hoovering”, and it’s typically done when a narcissistic person is feeling bored, lonely, or otherwise needs attention. They reach out to old sources of supply in the hopes of getting what they need. But make no mistake. They’re still the same people they always were, and they think nothing of the people they’re reaching out to. I could respond to her, but it would be meaningless to her. She’d be just as happy if someone else she’d reached out to, out of the blue, responded to her query. She doesn’t care about reconnecting with me. It’s not about her desire to be friends with me. She doesn’t actually value me as a person, other than what I can give her… which I suspect, at this point, is attention. It’s about having that all important ego supply. It’s called Hoovering for a reason. They’re trying to suck you back into a shitty relationship, just like the famous vacuum cleaner sucks up dirt.

It makes me sad, too, because we grew up together and I have so many memories of hanging out with her. We did have a lot of good times, even though my parents hadn’t liked her and tried to warn me about her. I should have listened to my mom, even though it was she and my ex friend’s mom who had gotten us together in the first place.

Anyway… I no longer think about her much, although the initial breakup was very painful for me. I don’t wish ill on her. I don’t care enough about her to wish ill on her. I liked her brother well enough, but I’m not getting back into that shit with her. She brought out the worst in me. She can go Hoover someone else.